Mrs. Quantrill lived in a beautiful old Prairie-style house built in the twenties, which she had restored to its original elegance with Mr. Quantrill, a patent attorney attached to Montana’s burgeoning natural-gas industry. Mrs. Quantrill had raised all kinds of hell getting the house listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The Quantrills were known for their philanthropy and for elegant parties, featuring such high jinks as horses in the living room and mock gunfights on the lawn. Hereditary landowners who no longer lived on their land, they plied it for energy leases. They hung on to their cattle brands long after the last cow had gone down the road, beautiful single-iron brands from territorial days. When their son, Spencer, inherited the house many years later, he demolished it and replaced it with storage units. Even these fell into disrepair, and it was hard to know if they produced any income, because Spencer, who’d temporarily lived in one of the units, had long since moved away. Such was Mrs. Quantrill’s standing that her appearance in the grade-school principal’s office, with the then nine-year-old Spencer in tow, required a bit of fanfare, which she provided by doffing her coat and abruptly removing her lovely gloves a finger at a time. Back then, before such people concealed their prominence, it was not unusual to dress up even for small occasions such as this one. Mrs. Quantrill was the tallest person in the room and very thin, with unblinking blue eyes. Spencer hovered beside her as Mr. Cooper, the principal, in a tan suit and referee’s whistle, directed them to two chairs, then sidled behind his desk and sat down, fingers laced under his chin. “Hi, Spencer.” “Hi.” “Thank you for coming, Mrs. Quantrill. Spencer’s struggling. Aren’t you, Spencer?” “I guess so.” Spencer sat with his tennis shoes one atop the other and pushed his hair across his forehead. He seemed not to know what to do with his feet, his eyes, or his hands. “Struggling how?” Mrs. Quantrill asked sharply. “You describe it, Spencer.” “Can’t pay attention?” He looked to his mother to see if that was the correct answer. “What’s the whistle for?” she asked the principal. Mr. Cooper fingered the whistle as though noticing it for the first time and declined to answer. “I think Spencer wants to participate and enjoy things, but he often seems . . . stunned.” “Stunned?” Mrs. Quantrill said. “Hardly.” Spencer reversed the order of his tennis shoes, placing his left foot on top of his right. “Anyway, I think it might be in Spencer’s best interest to let him enjoy a spell in special ed—get the pressure off him a bit and let him spread his wings.” “Special ed?” Mrs. Quantrill got to her feet, eyes flashing, plucked her coat from the back of her chair, and said, “Over my dead body.” “I see. What do you think is best?” “I’ll raise his standards in my own way. I have tickets to Bayreuth, and I shall take Spencer with me this year. No one leaves Wagner unimproved.” “Who?” “Wagner!” “Ah.” In the car, Mrs. Quantrill spoke non-stop. She glanced down Main Street and remarked, “What a hole.” It was nearly dark, and most of the small businesses there were being closed and locked by their owners. “Mr. Cooper means well, Spencer. He wants to help you, and he’s correct in noticing that your grades are not what they should be. That wretched water-bed outlet is finally going out of business! But we all develop at different speeds, and though I was tall and strong and popular at your age, your father was small and fearful, and just look how he turned out. The mighty oak, single acorn, et cetera. And, my angel, you’re going to love Bayreuth, this year especially, because we will see ‘Parsifal,’ and you’ll find out why Mommy calls you that, and you will be strengthened and return to school with something new that will be felt by everyone—students, teachers, and even nice Mr. Cooper, with that dopey whistle, who thought you should be in special ed. So let’s break the news to Daddy: it’s summer in Bavaria for all of us. Look, Spencer, there’s that place where Daddy bought those Italian snow tires. Why did Daddy think Italians would know how to make snow tires? When he slid off the road in front of the airport, he found out how much they know! You probably think I was pretty rude to the principal, what’s his name, but no, Spencer, I was only being direct. I’m not a bad person. I thought the faster he knew my feelings the better. I’m just going to let this policeman pass me. I don’t like feeling that I’m being followed, no matter who it is. Spencer, you’re too quiet, and it makes me think you’re disapproving. Are you asleep back there?” After watching his mother leave the school parking lot without him, Spencer first considered going back into the school, but trying to explain to Mr. Cooper or anyone else how his mother just got caught up in her thoughts seemed to be beyond him. He was sure that if he waited she would eventually realize she had forgotten him, but standing there alone would have people wondering about him, so he set out walking, though it was almost dark and getting cold. If she hadn’t driven off so fast, he would have been in his bedroom by now with his aquarium light turned on, the guppies and angelfish swimming around the bubbler or darting for the flakes of food he dropped. He hadn’t seen this street before. Of all the houses along it, only two had lights bright enough to show where the sidewalk was. Spencer looked back and tried to remember how many turns he had made and why he thought he had been heading toward more lights instead of fewer. He stopped. His hat was in his desk at school, and his head was getting cold, but the idea of knocking on a stranger’s door to ask for a hat swept him with shyness and desperation. A car turned onto the dark end of the street, and as its headlights hit Spencer it slowed to a crawl. Its lights were so bright that he covered his eyes until the car drew alongside him. Still blinded, Spencer could see no more than the outline of a man’s head in the driver’s window. It seemed a long time before the driver spoke. “Hello, son, you look like you could use a ride. Care to hop in?” When Spencer opened the door to get in, the interior light came on, showing an older man with a white crewcut that stood straight up, wearing a buttoned sweater with a picture of an elk in its wool. Spencer got only a quick look, because when he closed the door the light went off and the man was just an outline again. “Where are we headed, young man?” Spencer didn’t know what to say and so said nothing. “Better tell me where or I’ll run out of gas idling here like this.” Buy the print » Spencer felt anxious trying to come up with a plausible answer. The driver had put the car in gear but took it out again and sat back and crossed his arms. Under pressure, Spencer wanted to blink. Finally, he said, “Bayreuth.” “Buy-Rite? Jeez, that’s way on the other side of town. And it’s closed. Is someone picking you up at Buy-Rite?” Spencer couldn’t speak. “I wish you’d say something. You want to play the radio? You want me to play the radio? O.K., no radio.” It occurred to Spencer that this was like school: he was always tongue-tied just when people wanted to help him. It would all get worked out at Bayreuth, he told himself, even if it was closed at this hour. His mother would take over the situation. She hadn’t meant to forget him and would soon have him back with his aquarium. Today was Thursday, and sometimes on Fridays his father brought him a fish in a water-filled zip-lock bag. Last time, it had been a Siamese fighting fish upside down in the bag, and it had had to go down the toilet. Then his dad had done some research and explained to Spencer that until they got a better bubbler they really couldn’t get another fish. So they got one with a little deep-sea diver with bubbles coming out of his helmet, but so far no new fish. The car stopped under the “LIVE WELL—PHARMACY—PHOTO CENTER” sign. “Is this it?” No one in sight. The pulsing red neon reflected off the dashboard and lit the side of the driver’s face. Spencer needed his mother here to do the talking. He managed, “Maybe not.” “Son, you gotta help me. Where do you want to go? I was supposed to be at the Legion ten minutes ago.” “Maybe back to the school.” “School is closed, too! O.K., please don’t cry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice, but this is getting to be a problem. There’s a Buy Rite Auto on the frontage road. That sound like it? No?” The driver gripped the wheel hard, then rested his head on it. “Please tell me where to take you. Stop, don’t open the glove compartment!” “Is it loaded?” “Yes, yes, put it back now. I have a permit for that. I need it. I’m a travelling salesman. Thank you.” “Someday, I’ll have a gun.” And a big mustache, he thought. “When you’re old enough and have received proper training. So, now where are we headed? Son, tell me the truth, do you actually want to go home?” “There’s the road,” Spencer said, pointing to a road that angled off to the west, a road he had never seen before. “How far?” “It’s quite a ways.” Soon, all the houses dropped away into the dark. It was possible to see the shapes of bluffs and, well back from the road and barely different from the stars, the occasional yard light at a ranch. A jackrabbit paused, lit up in the headlights, then vanished. For a while, the only sound was the pop of bugs against the windshield. The car came to a stop in the middle of the road, and the driver scratched his crewcut frantically with both hands, then covered his face. “I can see it now—kidnapping, child molester, the whole nine yards. Son, you have to get out of the car.” When he uncovered his face, Spencer was playing with the gun again. “Oh, boy, how were you raised, anyway? That’s not a plaything.” The man reached over and took the gun from Spencer. “I tried to help you. My conscience is clear. Out you go.” Spencer gripped the seat and didn’t budge. He wanted to keep going down the road. The man’s voice came in a roar. “Get the fuck out now before I hit you over the head! You’re starting to scare me.” Spencer opened the door, hoping the driver would change his mind, then got out and closed the door. He had wanted to speak, but as he searched through his mind nothing came to him. It was wonderful how the night smelled and how huge the stars seemed as the car pulled slowly away, pushing open a strip of road with its headlights. Once the sound of its motor had faded, a roar of insects filled the emptiness. Spencer was very still as he followed his happiness to its source and smiled to think, No one knows where I am. The driver was a nice man, but maybe this is better. Then the lights of the distant car seemed to circle, and Spencer saw that it was coming back. He looked quickly to his left and to his right, but he couldn’t move. The driver leaned over to thrust open the passenger door. “Get in.” Spencer did so and closed the door. “Son, I can’t leave you out here by yourself. Something might happen to you.” “I wasn’t scared.” “You don’t know enough to be scared! God almighty!” As the car pulled forward, Spencer looked longingly into the dark. He thought of his mother and wondered if she would remember to feed the fish. He pictured them at the surface of the aquarium looking up at him, expecting to be fed. “As soon as we get to some town, I’m going to find a phone. Yes sirree, Bob, I’m gonna find me a phone and figure out where you belong.” They crossed a creek on a noisy bridge where telephone poles had been stacked. Just beyond was an empty house and a car on blocks, then the road climbed slowly on a straightaway toward the first lights they had seen in a long time. As they approached, the driver slowed down, holding the top of his head with one hand: a sheriff’s car was parked there, and several officers stood on either side of the road near it. “An accident? Doesn’t seem like there’s enough cars to have one.” The driver rolled his window down. “But this is good, son. Maybe you’ll talk to these fellers.” Two officers came to the driver’s door. They looked hard through the window at Spencer, glanced at each other, pulled open the door, dragged the driver onto the road, and handcuffed him behind his back. The opposite door opened, and Spencer was swept into the arms of a burly deputy. There were lights everywhere, and Spencer cried, but not for the reasons the worried lawmen believed. On the radio, in the papers, but mostly in people’s mouths, news of the kidnapper ballooned. In town, the driver’s relatives were dismayed to learn of this side of his character and anxious to put some distance between them and him. The interrogator from Helena was delayed by a passing hailstorm, and by the time he got to the town jail the driver had done away with himself, an expression that Spencer failed to understand and which his mother explained by using her hands to illustrate a bird flying off. Even so, he suspected that he was being misled. Now the newscasters were full of questions as to whether it had been mothball- or golf-ball-size hail. A widow up at Ten Mile went on TV with a hailstone the size of a grapefruit, but subsequent investigation revealed it to be something from her freezer.

I took a piece of paper from Moshe’s messy desk and made a list of winter clothes to buy: Pair of corduroy trousers. Two flannel shirts. Undershirts—long sleeves. Long underwear. Wool socks. And maybe new pajamas, too. All this for him. And for me: Sweater. Winter skirt. Or maybe pants instead. Something not too expensive. Warm stockings. Flannel nightgown. (And replace the wicks in the kerosene heaters and the light bulb that shows if the boiler is working or isn’t working.) During breakfast, I said to him, “Moshe, listen, the summer is over and in the end we didn’t take that organized tour to Spain, so instead maybe you could give me the three and a half thousand shekels to buy some things for winter.” Moshe said, “O.K., fine. But, listen, first I have something to tell you. It’s like this. During the factory outing to Netanya, a month ago—you remember—when you didn’t feel like going with me, I met this woman there, and afterward it turned out that we kept seeing each other, and now, well, I’ve decided to leave you, even though I’m very sorry about it. Honestly. But what can I do, Bracha? I just have no choice.” And where was I that morning when they met for the first time at the factory outing in Netanya? As far as I remember, I was at the hairdresser. While Lucien was cutting off three-quarters of my curls, Moshe and that woman were sneaking out of the deputy director’s lecture and sitting next to each other in the lounge chairs on the terrace of the hotel in Netanya, where you can probably see the promenade, the sea, and the clouds. For every one of my curls that fell to the floor, they exchanged a smile or some knowing remark. By the time Lucien turned off my hair dryer, they were already in love. When I was paying and leaving, they were already holding hands. And my curls? A girl, Suzy, with purple lip gloss, who’s apprenticing with Lucien now and looks a little like some actress, swept them out to the sidewalk, so everybody stepped on them. Afterward, a sea breeze came along and blew them away, and where are they now? Probably blew across the border into Jordan. What foolishness, to go and get my hair cut and take off three-quarters of my curls. And on that very same morning. The day after he told me that he just had no choice, I asked him, “Moshe, maybe you could at least tell me what I did? What’s wrong with me?” He got angry, but silently. He just picked up his fork and took out all his anger on the hard-boiled egg on his plate, until the white was mush and the yellow inside was flattened and striped from the fork. I kept my eyes on his plate the whole time, because I was afraid to look straight at him. But he didn’t say a thing. Maybe he didn’t hear me, or maybe he happened to be thinking about something else. Often he’s thinking of something else when people are talking to him. I don’t blame him for sometimes not hearing what I’m saying to him. Because he really does have a hard time at work. He has too much on his shoulders, and that Alfred keeps him on a short leash. I tried again: I said to him, “Moshe, you owe me at least this much, at least tell me what I’ve done wrong.” I lifted my eyes and saw that he was behind the Daily News, but he made the effort and put the paper down for a minute to answer me. “Now, you see, that’s precisely the trouble with you—you’ll never learn to figure out for yourself when I’m busy and when I’m not in the mood and when not to bother me and to leave me alone in peace. And, besides that, Bracha, it’s not because of you—it’s because of her. How come you don’t get that?” Now that I think about it calmly, I can see that I really should have picked a better time to talk to him about it. And, now that I think about it calmly, I also see that there were actually a lot of nights over the past month when he didn’t come home, or came home late, after I was already asleep. I didn’t pay attention to it. I thought, Maybe they’ve got a lot of shipments again, got some big order, and Alfred’s keeping him there half the night. When I phoned the factory a few times late at night and there was no answer, I didn’t think anything of that, either. I thought, Maybe he’s down on the shop floor or out at the loading dock, and has to stay there to supervise the night-shift shipments. I didn’t want to bother him. It’s best to leave him alone when he’s having problems at work, or pressure. I didn’t even think about it when three or four times the phone rang at home, and, when I’d pick it up right away and say hello, whoever was calling would hang up. I could at least have dialled *42 to see who it was, but it didn’t occur to me then. I wasn’t looking for signs. Only since he said to me, “Bracha, I’m leaving you,” since then all day long I can’t stop looking for signs. Even though, actually, where will it get me, looking for signs? What’s the point? “Whoa, don’t ask constitutional questions you don’t want to know the answers to.”Buy the print » Every morning, I have a sink full of dishes, some from the night before, too, and instead of washing them I have another cup of coffee, and another one, and sometimes another, until my heart starts to pound, and then I sit myself down at his desk and tear off a sheet of paper with the factory logo, and begin to plan what to make us for dinner and what to get at the supermarket and what not to get at the supermarket, better to buy at the greengrocer. As long as Moshe is still home, I cook for him. As long as he keeps most of his things here, I wash and iron. When his things aren’t here anymore, maybe I’ll take a little break from cooking. And ironing. A vacation. I’ll eat standing up, straight from the Frigidaire, and that’s it. Fewer dishes. Anyway, in the morning I don’t feel much like doing anything. Except watching television: I get up, put on a robe, sit in the kitchen, and watch through the pass-through into the living room. Whatever is on—about Ninjas, about the leopards that used to live in the Judean Desert and have almost completely disappeared, about how people survive in earthquake zones, about rain forests and crocodiles in the land of Brazil. There was one program about two men, good friends from the Holocaust, Yossel the Painter and Yossel the Writer, and you could see them standing together in a room and sort of shoving each other, but not hard, the way friends do, you know? Or maybe they were putting on a show, pretending to be friends for the cameraman. At about noon, I turn off the television, take off my robe, and go back to bed to sleep, and the dishes—well, they can wait, what’s the hurry? I didn’t remember at all that I’d made myself an omelette first thing in the morning, and I didn’t remember that I’d eaten it, but I remembered very well that a fried egg, the longer it sticks to the frying pan the harder it is to scrape off. And I remembered very well that if I stopped eating fried foods completely and started a diet . . . but there’s really no point. I’m a metre sixty-six and weigh sixty-six kilos, so I’m just right, according to the charts, and don’t need to lose weight. I don’t even know if my husband’s woman is thinner than me. Maybe she’s the opposite—full, sort of rounded—and if I had any sense I’d make an effort to fill out a bit so as not to have a figure like a broomstick. In the end, I washed the dishes after all, in case he came home to get some more things and got angry at me for no reason. On the fridge there is a little bulletin board with a plastic covering and a special kind of pencil that you use to write whatever you have to do today, and afterward you lift the plastic and it erases everything and there’s no sign left, as though it had never been. Tomatoes. Carrots. Rolls. Cheeses. And from now on we’re done with the playacting in bed. Don’t need to wear that stiff brassiere with two holes in the cups for him anymore. “Do to me like you did in Tiberias.” “Today I want you to do the Chalice to me.” And I don’t have to pretend to come anymore. Challah. Eggs. Instant coffee. Garbage bags. Soap for the dishwasher and detergent for the washing machine. Matches. In Sigalit’s advice column it says: Age is in the mind. You are exactly as old as you feel. A man before sex and a man right after are entirely different creatures. The way to keep him from wandering is to be an entire harem for him. Sexual variety: every woman has it. Exposé: Kitty Kensington reveals nine ways to stay mysterious. But, above all, remember that a relationship is first and foremost based on consideration and mutual respect. Danish experts analyze the mystery of love: is it a form of selfishness, or a form of generosity, or both? Exclusive: Pazit Linkowitz speaks out. Talks for the first time about the crisis in her relationship with Ziki Zentner: “How I turned my frigidity into a lethal weapon in bed.” Sex and candor: opposites? The in thing in the jet set: A mature woman takes herself a novice as a lover. New research: Life begins when the kids leave home! And I have to tell the boys and their wives what’s happened to us. Why me? Let him tell them. But should I remind him to tell them? He’ll be annoyed with me if I remind him. Baguettes. Yogurts. Frozen chicken. Eggplants. Potatoes. Avocado. Olives. Diseases. The grave. I got dressed and went out to do some shopping and errands. It will be winter soon, and we still haven’t fixed the leak from the balcony window. Also, the technician needs to come to adjust the television, even though Moshe sort of fixed it on Purim, because on the cable channels there’s snow half the time. Who is she, this woman he found for himself on the factory outing in Netanya? How old is she? Is she married? Single? Maybe she’s a divorcée or a widow? With children or without? And what presents has he bought her already? Now he’ll take her on the organized tour of Spain, instead of me. For two years, he’s been talking about Spain, Spain, but it never worked out. First, we enclosed the balcony, and last year we replaced the washing machine, instead of going to Spain. Buy the print » Has he bought her clothes? For the winter? What did he buy? Where did he buy them? And what presents does she give him? Whatever you give him, he always says, “Really? What for? For heaven’s sake, what do you think I’m going to do with this?” And, in general, what does she get from him? With his belly and his flab and the hairs in his ears and the smell. He has a problem with his sweat glands. Because of that, and because of the smell from his mouth, I prefer that he do me from behind, with my face toward the mattress. Or that I sit on top of him, as far as possible from his mouth. What position does he do her in? How does she manage with the smell? But what use is it to me to know if she has to wear a stiff brassiere with two holes in the cups in bed with him and pretend to come? Or if he says to her, “Come do the Chalice to me”? And, really, it makes no difference to me what she looks like. Though ever since he made his announcement I’ve begun to look carefully at women. After all, she could be anyone over the age of sixteen and under the age of fifty, because he promised for my fiftieth birthday to take me on a second honeymoon to Spain, except that instead we closed in the balcony so he’d have a study. Maybe that’s her, the Russian cashier at the supermarket? Those Russian women really do have something very sexy about them; they give the impression that they’ve done it all and they’d do anything you ask in bed. Or maybe it’s that blonde standing over there, squeezing the vegetables, in a miniskirt? Or that one over there, with the big bosom? He would always turn his head to look at blondes in minis and at not-blondes in not-minis if they had a big bosom. And then he’d say to me, “Really, what do you care, Bracha? So what if I turn my head? Barking dogs don’t bite, right?” Maybe it’s the girl who stood right in front of me yesterday in line at the bank and kept turning around and looking at me? Or maybe it’s that tramp with the shorts and the high heels over there in front of the boutique, with half her bosom hanging out, trying to hail a taxicab? Or it may be someone that I actually know very well personally. Someone from the factory—Alfred’s fat secretary, or that bookkeeper who walks around in clothes fit for a young girl? It could even be, by chance, the very salesgirl in the boutique who’s lying to my face right now, saying that I look wonderful in these white jeans, even though we both know that she’s lying, that they’re too big for me, because she doesn’t have my size? What a fool I am. With legs like mine I could also walk around in a mini. Even in shorts. Or maybe it’s Dahlia. After all, yesterday when I was leaving Maiman’s Deli I saw her from a distance waving at me strangely, and then she disappeared. Why did she run away from me? Or maybe she didn’t and it just seemed that way to me. I followed her into the middle of the street and called out to her, “Dahlia, Dahlia,” but not loud enough, or maybe I was loud enough, but couldn’t be heard because the cars began to honk at me from both directions, so I was stuck in the middle of the street, couldn’t cross and couldn’t go back to my side. In the end, I managed to get back to the sidewalk and even thought for a minute that I should phone her and ask her, “Dahlia, what, did something happen?” But instead I sat down there on a bench in the memorial park and started to comb my hair with a comb and a little mirror from my handbag. Combed for a very long time, though I have hardly any hair left after what Lucien did to me, and I have no one to blame but my own stupid self. After all, it won’t be much help to me to know the truth, but I would like to know, anyway, if he loves her or if it’s all about sex, and if he still loves me a little bit, and if he ever loved me at all? At least in the very beginning? When he still called me sweetie pie? And if she also likes to squeeze his blackheads, and does he let her and not get annoyed at her? And, in general, what is it like when there’s genuine love? I’d like to see it once, just so I’d know. If we’re talking about relationships, you could say that all in all I got from him thirty years of very good treatment, consideration, gifts here and there, and sometimes he would even pay me a nice compliment on my looks or my cooking or how I took care of things: “You’re the best, Bracha. Bracha, today you’re tops.” And, every time we argued, in the end we’d make up. Every trip he took abroad for the factory, he would always bring something back for me and the children. Mostly he’d bring me perfume—Poison, because he was afraid to pick out anything else by himself. His lover also has Poison; I smelled it on his clothes after he told me and, since then, I’ve stopped wearing perfume altogether, but his clothes still smell of it. I once read in Sigalit’s advice column that a man’s sexual attraction is driven primarily by the sense of smell. That Sigalit woman is totally wrong, because if that were truly the case, and if the lover and I wear exactly the same perfume, then why would he change women? “I really liked that stuff you were saying about all of us being sinners and how we’re damned for eternity.”December 3, 2001Buy the print » I sat for a while on the bench in the park commemorating the fallen Navy heroes and considered the question from all sides. Maybe Moshe gave her my perfume on purpose, so that I wouldn’t smell the scent of another woman on him and suspect something? Or maybe, by coincidence, she also wore Poison even before he started up with her? Maybe he didn’t start with her at all, and she was the one who started with him? Maybe when he said to me, “Look, Bracha, I have no choice now,” he meant to say that she was pregnant by him? Or, very simply, right at the beginning, Moshe told her that Poison was the perfume he liked best, and, as soon as she heard that, she rushed out and bought herself a bottle, because she had also read the article in that moron Sigalit’s column? That’s the only thing I would ask her if we were to meet someday. The rest doesn’t matter to me. And, come to think of it, that doesn’t really matter, either. It’s such a shame I got my hair cut this way. And on the very same morning. Maybe he brought her home while I wasn’t there? Once? Several times? Did she inspect our family pictures on the sideboard first? Run her fingers over our wedding photo? And did Moshe undress her and lay her down on the sofa in the living room? On the rug? Or even in the bedroom on our bed? On top of the bedspread or first taking off the bedspread? Did he ask her to do the Chalice to him? Did she do it? Was she repulsed? Which of my towels did she use? Did she use my toothpaste afterward? My hairbrush? My cotton balls? Did she take a little of the Poison that he brought me as a gift from Rome? Touch my skirts in the closet? Peek in my drawers? Inspect my underwear? Wonder about the brassiere with two holes? I sat a while longer on the bench, because I didn’t have anywhere to rush off to, and I needed for once to sit and think really hard about everything. Luckily, I had a little notebook in my handbag with the factory logo and pages that you can tear out and one of those little gold-colored pens that fits inside. I wrote: Laundry. Ironing. Bring Moshe’s jacket to the dry cleaner. On Friday, buy flowers for the living room for Shabbat—maybe people will come over. Liquor: check what’s left in the bar. Nuts. Crackers. Pretzel sticks. Black olives. Cheeses and those little tomatoes and all kinds of snacks. Maybe ice cream also, two flavors. And, in the winter, when it’s wet outside and everything is empty, you’ll sit at home night after night by yourself, watching the Shopping Channel, and you’ll hear only the rain pounding in the gutter. Some fruit. Paper napkins. Good coffee. Assorted candies. Also, I need to call the technician so that the snow finally stops falling on us in the middle of the movie channels. And call Ilan’s Shirley and Yoav’s Orly, because the boys are both abroad on business, to tell them that we’re getting divorced. Yoav is coming back in a few days and Ilan will be away at least another month, but it’s a little hard for me to remember when they each left, and, in general, it’s a little hard for me now. And change the wicks in the kerosene heaters and the light that shows if the boiler is working or isn’t working. Buy a toy for Yaniv and fix the leak from enclosing the balcony last winter and make two new keys for the mailbox, to replace the ones that got lost, so that the mailbox isn’t open all day and all night for our charming neighbors to look at all our bills and bank notices. And pay the maintenance already—Moshe keeps putting it off, and it’s beginning to be unpleasant. After all, it’s already October, nearly winter, and after that the Passover Seder—I need to plan the Seder meal and prepare everything tip-top, without any favors this time from Yoav’s snooty wife, and without any favors from the other one, either, that nasty wife of Ilan’s. This nice little notebook fell straight from heaven with its little gold pen. And what’s so bad about being an undependent woman living alone in a house, without his yelling, without the weekend newspaper sections scattered all over the house every week, without drops of pee on the toilet seat, without his crumpled socks under the bed and under the easy chair, without doing the Chalice to him and then pretending that you’ve come because of it? After a while, I got up from the bench, stood in front of the black boulder, and read one by one the names of all the fallen Navy heroes, so young, just children, really, and each one with a mother—what’s my tragedy compared with their tragedy? And I thought about the fact that some of them probably died before they had ever touched a woman and what a pity, because now, in my new situation as an undependent woman, why not, I could put on a little Poison and so on, no problem, and every so often take fallen heroes to bed, to make them feel good and me, too, in the time I have left before the diseases set in and the grave. Afterward, I left the memorial park and wandered along the streets and looked a bit in the store windows, or, to be exact, I looked in the glass of the store windows to see how I looked. Sometimes I appeared short and square, and sometimes I was tall and thin, like a matchstick figure. With the money for the vacation to Spain we didn’t take last summer for my fiftieth birthday, I could have had a face-lift or a breast enhancement. You can have anything done these days. Or, for about the same amount, I could have gone to visit my good friend Behira, who’s been living in Geneva for the past twenty years. She’s very wealthy, and once she wrote me a letter to say that I was invited to visit her whenever I was in the area. She isn’t called Behira there; she’s Blanche, and her husband is a German engineer who is much younger than her. Behira, she was the first girl in our class at Heroes Hill Public School to buy a see-through lace bra and undies, which was a brand-new thing then, and they said that boys went crazy for them, but the girls also went a little crazy for them. “God, I love the smell of sunblock in the morning.”July 3, 2006Buy the print » The street was filled with all sorts of women. Suddenly, I had an urge to know exactly what brassiere and undies each one had on underneath. There were some who walked down the street together in pairs and laughed out loud. And there were lots of blondes, mostly with bleached hair, and probably they wore micro-string bikini pants underneath. Black. I could easily dye my hair blond—who’s to stop me? Or buy underwear like that or see-through lacy lingerie, like Behira’s. So when Moshe asked me to go with him to the factory outing in Netanya, I should have just said yes and even bought sexy underwear for the trip and those stockings with lace trim and a miniskirt and dyed my hair blond. Moshe would have been completely crazy for me and wouldn’t have even thrown a glance in the direction of that woman. Instead, on that very same day, I went and let Lucien shear everything off. Such a fool. I slaughtered myself all by myself. Instead of going to Lucien that morning for a garçon cut, I should just have gone to Sandra for a permanent. Now it’s too late. The wind here usually blows from west to east, so my curls have probably blown all the way to China by now. But why am I even sitting here and writing everything that happened on Moshe’s pad with the factory logo? Not for Moshe to read, God forbid. Certainly not for the children. Maybe it will turn out to be a long letter to my friend, my old classmate Behira? Except that no one has called her Behira for a while; she’s Blanche now, and for quite some time she has lived not in this country but in Geneva, with her husband, the German engineer, who is younger than her by a good many years. Greetings, Behira, dear Blanche. How are you, and how are things over there? Do you still remember our teacher Tzila Tzipkin, with the red boots? It must be thirty-five years since we saw each other, you and I, but no matter. You were almost always my best friend and you are still my best friend, so that’s why I’m sitting here and writing to you about all this tragedy that has befallen me. I wonder if these days you still wear those gorgeous undies and bras, with lace, sort of see-through? To hold on to your German engineer husband, so he doesn’t run off? Or maybe, just the opposite, you let him run off wherever he wants, because you already have a lover and you only wear the fancy bras and see-through pink undies with lace trim for him? If only I had your address in Geneva, we could start to correspond, just the two of us. Or has that husband of yours thrown you aside, too, since you are already my age, and, actually, weren’t you two Translated months older than me? All the way home I walked and looked only at women. I didn’t see any men in the street at all, or maybe the men had become transparent to me, like glass, except for the Navy heroes, who are already dead and lost. I took an especially close look at women who were wearing miniskirts or shorts, with or without pantyhose. I’ve never liked how women’s legs are thin below the knee and just above the knee get heavier and heavier. What’s sexy about that? Knees in general have always seemed really ugly to me, as though someone had taken two sticks and soldered them together and the solder didn’t turn out well, sort of rough and swollen. There were a few women on the street with a strong smell of perfume, and I started to follow them and tried to sniff—was it Poison? One girl even got annoyed and turned around and said, “Excuse me, what exactly is your problem?” And I answered her, “Nothing. Nice to meet you. My name is Bracha and I’m getting divorced soon.” It was the first time I’d said those words out loud, and when I heard them come out of my mouth I almost fell apart. It was only fear of embarrassment that held me together, because I couldn’t very well fall apart in front of total strangers and start crying in the middle of the street. So I held it in. And, in the end, Behira, I went to Yaniv’s nursery school anyway, right on time, and took him to buy him a toy and, on the way, I told him that Grandpa was leaving me. Yaniv asked if it was because of him, because he was a bad boy at our house on Saturday afternoon? I said, “How should I know because of what? Maybe it’s best if you ask Grandpa yourself, Yaniv. Call him up at work and promise him that you won’t have any tantrums or make a mess ever again. That you won’t fool around with his video machine anymore. Maybe that will touch him?” Yaniv said, “O.K., good,” and put one finger on his heart and then touched me where my heart is. A girl in jeans sat on the bench in front of the post office with a little dog on her lap. Yaniv went over to pet the dog for a minute, and when we left he said that the dog had wanted to bite him. I said, “Don’t be silly, the dog didn’t do anything to you,” and Yaniv said, “No, he didn’t actually bite, but he wanted to.” I asked why he would say such a thing, how could he know what the dog wanted. And Yaniv began to pout and didn’t want to talk to me anymore.

She didn’t know what had possessed her to participate in such a thing. A little boy had been run over by a sheriff’s deputy, and there was a memorial fund-raiser at the Barbed Wire, a biker bar in a somewhat alarming part of town, and Ruth had gone and bought a beer and put thirty dollars into an empty terrarium, for funeral expenses. The place was loud and crowded, and she was given a plate with a tamale on it. Outside, someone had brought a pony and was providing pony rides for the dead boy’s friends. No one spoke to her directly, but she learned that the boy’s name was Hector and that his father was suing the sheriff’s department. Good, Ruth thought. But Hector’s death, it seemed, was Hector’s fault. He had run into the street against the light. His fault, against the light—the details were so paltry. Ruth could have told Hector’s father that he would find no satisfaction with his lawsuit, but she never returned to the Barbed Wire, where she might have found him, to express this belief. It was a tough little place. Going there had been one of the last journeys she had taken, though, of course, she did not know this at the time. It had been difficult to find. The closer she got to it the more frequently she’d had to ask for directions. People had assumed that she was looking for something else and had not been as helpful as they might have been. None of Ruth’s friends knew about her excursion to the little fellow’s memorial, which, Ruth had to remind herself, had been scarcely a memorial at all but a fund-raiser, which she had respectfully participated in, though why she had given the curious amount of thirty dollars was a puzzle. It was probably all she’d had in her purse at the time—all she ever seemed to have in her purse. No one had spoken on behalf of the boy, and there hadn’t been a single photograph of him there, not even a duplicate of the poor one that had appeared in the newspaper, cropped from a group of people, it seemed, his little face shaded by a preposterously large cowboy hat and quite blurry. It was probably just coincidence that a child appeared not long after that. This one, a girl, belonged to the doctor who lived nearby in a house painted a prominent aubergine. The house had once been invisible from Ruth’s veranda, or what she called her veranda, but the doctor had removed a stand of cottonwoods in order to install solar panels, and now she could make out a sliver of the sprawling place. The removal had been modestly controversial, but supporters of the doctor’s actions had argued that the trees were running on fumes, anyway, and, being as starved and delusional as they were, could be dangerous. She supposed the fools were talking about memory—the trees’ memory of some water source that had now dried up. Greetings between Ruth and the child had never been exchanged before. Nor were they now, exactly. It was a hot day, as all the days were, and Ruth was on her veranda, eating a tuna-fish sandwich. She seldom ate tuna-fish sandwiches, because she found them an uncomfortable physical experience. After a few swallows, she felt as if she were having a heart attack. There was the tightness in her chest, her esophagus constricting, resisting passage, her oppressive baffled alarm. It was as if the splendid and courageous giant of the oceans were rising up in horror, disputing what had been done to it, and why should it not. . . . Putting the sandwich aside, Ruth took large gulps of air and then small ones, trying to restore order to her thrashing chest. The girl watched her gravely. Ruth suspected that she was there to request permission to play in the gully behind her house, which Ruth considered an attractive nuisance, though it was by no means attractive. Indeed, it was more like a ravine, a dark peculiarity, than a gully. But the child did not request permission, which Ruth wouldn’t have granted anyway. Instead she said, “I would like to draw you in plein air.” “No, thanks,” Ruth said. “Do you have dogs?” “I do.” “May I see them?” “No,” Ruth said. “You used to have dogs. To reassure you, I could show you some work I’ve done in the past.” She was not an appealing child, but she didn’t seem mentally deficient or malformed, either. Still, she was something of a runt, made more runtlike by the enormous backpack she wore. From this pink, somewhat smelly apparatus she extracted several pieces of construction paper. “These aren’t good at all!” Ruth exclaimed. She was sincerely dismayed. “I’m just beginning,” the child said. “I should be encouraged.” “Not by me, I’m afraid,” Ruth said. “Do you give blood?” “What do you mean?” “Do you ever give blood?” “No,” Ruth said. “You should. Only thirty-eight per cent of the population is eligible to give blood, and only eight per cent of them actually donate. The need for blood is constant and ongoing.” “Maybe I’m not eligible.” “I bet you are. You probably are.” “I’m old. I need my blood.” Was this what they talked about at the doctor’s house—blood? And the efficient avidity of those hideous solar slabs? Ruth had no children but many friends. Or she thought she had many friends. They stood up pretty well to her requirements, but sometimes they didn’t. Actually, she could probably count fewer friends now than she’d had even a year ago. As for children, though her experience with them was limited, this one here seemed a doozy. She wondered if the girl had ever encountered little Hector, but quickly dismissed the possibility. The two travelled in different circles, lived in separate worlds, the doctor’s daughter and the felon’s son—for it had been disclosed that Hector’s father had a rap sheet as long as your arm, though he hadn’t done anything recently. That backpack needed to be washed and thoroughly aired. “Would you like some of my old jewelry to play with?” Ruth surprised herself by saying. “I guess,” the child said. “You go away now, and when you come back in a few months, say, I’ll give you some jewelry.” “I’ll come back tomorrow.” “That’s so soon!” Ruth protested. “But all right. The day after tomorrow. The important thing is to go away now.” Ruth retreated inside and watched the child trudge back to the aubergine house, the sliver of which was so unpleasantly visible. The backpack all but eclipsed her. It must be quite heavy, Ruth thought, or something. When the child appeared again, Ruth was back on her veranda, staring without much interest at her right hand, which had recently completed a letter of condolence to her mechanic’s widow. As a rule, the mechanic had not accepted Toyotas, but he had made an exception for Ruth, and though he had worked on her car with some indifference and disdain, he’d kept it running, and at a fair price. People were dying right and left around Ruth. Death was picking up the pace. Two poets she had never met but read with great pleasure were taken on the same day. Her pedicurist had died, and what would Ruth do without her unjudgmental services? It was so easy to let oneself go. “You’re here for the jewelry, I suppose,” Ruth said. “I’d forgotten about the jewelry. But O.K.” Ruth had actually gone through her jewelry some time ago, but she was still amazed at how much of it she had. She could remember the provenance of only a fraction of it. “Provenance,” the girl said. “That’s an interesting word. What does it mean?” Ruth wasn’t aware that she had uttered the word aloud, though there was no reason not to, it being a perfectly benign word. The child was paler than Ruth remembered and scrawnier than ever. The pink backpack could quite possibly weigh more than she did. “Do you really need that thing?” Ruth inquired. “Doesn’t your mother ever wash it?” “The doctor?” Ruth supposed her own question had been merely rhetorical. “Bring it up here, take everything out of it, and I’ll scrub it with a good bar of soap.” The thought of some of her jewelry (for she had no intention of giving the girl all of it) being lowered into that stinking sack prompted her to action. Also, she was curious as to what could be in the massive thing. The child hopped up the steps, unstrapped herself, and began unzipping the backpack’s numerous pockets. This took some time. There was nothing. It held nothing. “You call that a bon mot?”Buy the print » Ruth decided that she didn’t want to tackle the problem with a good bar of soap. It was all right. Whatever. Sometimes you try to fix something and it ends up more broken than ever. Or broken in a different way. “You don’t even have your drawings in there. What happened to your drawings?” “I decided that was the wrong approach. What would you say your discomfort level is right now, on a scale of one to ten? One being your most comfortable or least discomfortable, of course.” “I’m quite comfortable, thank you,” Ruth said. “Mine’s around a six.” “To be honest, perhaps mine as well.” Neither chose to elaborate on these disclosures. A little breeze wound past them. Ruth remembered that breeze and was always grateful when it reappeared. The veranda was somewhat oppressive and in need of paint. Portions of the floor had rotted through, and you had to stay away from those. “Can I see your dogs?” “Not today,” Ruth said. “Thomas Aquinas said that friendship between humans and animals is impossible.” “That’s idiotic. I’ve never heard of anything more ridiculous.” “What could he have been thinking, right?” The child was hunched into her backpack again. “Once you’re dead, you shouldn’t be read.” “Well, I wouldn’t go that far,” Ruth said. “I have brothers and sisters, you know. A whole mess of them.” “Really? I haven’t been aware of them. I mean, I haven’t seen them.” “Just me.” “What?” “You’ve just seen me.” “Yes,” Ruth said. Ruth thought she’d walk up to the doctor’s house. Take a good look. Figure this thing out. Get to the bottom of it. She dressed as well as she could, for the weather was every which way; it was hard to know. First dry and hot, then such humidity that it was difficult to breathe. She selected a skirt and blouse, a sweater. Her closet was stuffed with things she hadn’t put on in years. She pulled out a pair of shoes that were velvety with mildew. One more wear and then out they’d go, she decided. She ate a bowl of cereal. The milk had gone bad. Sometimes the refrigerator took pride in keeping things cool and crisp and sometimes it didn’t seem to care. She began cautiously. The way was slippery, greasy almost, and tipped upward toward the aubergine house. The solar panels lay there, ruthless and withholding. The house was silent and looked pretty much the way it always had to Ruth. She hadn’t really examined it before, but scrutiny afforded her nothing new. Other than its perplexing color and the depressing row of stumps on its southern border it was unexceptional. The child did not appear; nor did any “mess” of others—not that Ruth would have been surprised if she were told by a responsible party that they didn’t exist. The girl was prone to enlarge on the truth, and her knowledge was exaggeratedly spotty, certainly. Ruth tried to think of herself at that age. It was winter, and she was sliding down Chicken Hill on a piece of cardboard. No one had real sleds with runners. Everyone had a piece of cardboard. It was called Chicken Hill because it ended at the road. You had to know what you were doing. She’d been a far more robust child than this one, and not as humorless or demanding. Though the girl was demanding only of her time so far, which wasn’t much or was everything, depending on how you looked at it. Chicken Hill, Chicken Hill, what a place! The world! She could feel the purity of its cold core and see the slick ice shining. Her sled had once been a carton that held gallon jugs of maple syrup. It was so strong—the finest, fastest board on Chicken Hill. . . . The sounds of children laughing and screaming faded, and she found herself standing dumbly before the doctor’s house, which exhibited no sign of life whatsoever. She turned and made her way down the street again to her own unkempt home. She saw this clearly: the place needed some fluffing up. But she had five dogs—there was a lot of wear and tear. More than five would have brought her to the attention of the authorities. “Keep the authorities at bay as long as you are able” was her motto. On the steps she paused and kicked off the foul shoes. She opened the door, hoping the dogs wouldn’t knock her over in ecstatic greeting. They had no idea of their size and were always so glad to see her. But the dogs were not there. They had vanished as though they’d never been, along with their bowls and beds. That last detail, that their belongings were gone, too, gave her hope that, despite appearances, a cruelty had not occurred. Naturally, Ruth was heartbroken. She loved her dogs. If such a thing could happen, anything could happen. Someone might suggest that she had not had the dogs at the same time—after all, five was a lot to handle at her age, and they’d been big dogs, too—but had a succession of dogs over the years. But that would have been mean and not helpful in the least. You can’t live a life that’s no longer your own. Which was a truth that surely didn’t apply only to her, for many must feel they are living lives that they no longer inhabit, just as sometimes the tears you shed seem to come from the eyes of another. Ruth was concerned that the child would ask to see the dogs, as she usually did, but she did not. Of course, Ruth could have said “No” or “Not today” once again, but it wouldn’t have been the same. “One of my classmates died,” the girl announced. “She was in my grade at school.” “And what grade is that?” Ruth asked, quite irrelevantly, she knew. Her voice had become faint with disuse. If it hadn’t been for the child’s visits she might have lost it altogether, and the visits were becoming less reliable. Their connection was wavering; Ruth could feel it. “The second. She had a rare form of cancer. They said they’d never seen such a cancer before, behaving the way it did.” “Oh, they’re always saying that,” Ruth said impatiently. “So many people came to her funeral. You’d think she’d taken a bullet for a senator or something.” “You must be sad. It’s quite sad.” “I know,” the girl said piously. “Death’s got the bit in her teeth these days, I’d say.” Ruth saw it then suddenly, as she would a picture, her horse, Abdiel. She would ride him on Chicken Hill in the summer, when the grass was high and smelled so sweet—grass could no longer smell as sweet. He was a big horse, probably too big for Ruth as a child, but they seemed to have an understanding, the two of them. Abdiel. Her mother and father had named him for the angel in “Paradise Lost”—“faithful found, / Among the faithless, faithful only he.” They had loved books; their house was full of books, all in other hands now, or worse, the books and pictures and animals. Ruth hadn’t been much of a reader herself. As a child, she’d wanted to possess herself, only herself. This was her duty. Yet she was aware that any moment could take away the assurance that this was possible. Her mother and father had not been very sensible. They were bohemians, romantics, clever and hungry and bright, believers in the wild freedoms that life bestows and which time and death are so eager to unsustain. Her father had said that Abdiel looked like Tolstoy’s horse, the one in the famous photograph, black and spirited, his gleaming flesh forever rippling and shuddering, as though grazed by an unseen hand, as they galloped on Chicken Hill—Chicken Hill, what a place! The world! “I believe,” the girl said, “and it saddens me to say this, but I believe we’ve come to the end of our options here.” “Have I told you about the horse, my horse, Abdiel?” “You have,” the girl said. “Oh my, I did? Because I haven’t thought about him in ever so long. And he was so real, such a living force, my determinant.” “Quite real,” the child agreed. “He was the last real thing, I think.” “Not a piece of harmless cardboard, not a scrap of my imagining.” “Imagination only fails us in the end, when the stories we tell ourselves have to stop. You don’t mind me saying that I’m going, do you? The doctor’s packing us all up. We’re going away.” “Where?” Ruth managed, but she didn’t hear her voice saying anything. Her voice had nothing to say. “Who knows? No one tells me anything.” Ruth was almost happy, getting to the bottom of it, for she felt that she had. The corners of her poor veranda were dissolving into shadow. She didn’t see the child leave her. She didn’t even see herself leaving, having just, at last, gone.

It was a little after 7 A.M., and outside in the garden her nine-year-old son, Finn, was stringing a tennis net between two trees, stringing it not in the normal fashion, the way one might to play tennis, but horizontally, like a hammock. He was wearing a pair of too short trousers, perhaps the trousers from last year’s school uniform, and no shoes. The grounds on this side of the property were ragged but pretty, bounded by a low stone wall that allowed views across the fields to the gray slate roofs of Portlaoise. “I think it might’ve been a mistake to tell him about the ducks,” Bill said. “It’s not about the ducks,” she said. “If it wasn’t the ducks, it would be something else.” They were having coffee in a room at the front of the house, a high-ceilinged, corniced room that she continued to think of as the dining room, though two years on it remained unfurnished, apart from a small mahogany table they’d brought from their old house and two faux Queen Anne chairs. The room was long and narrow, with a south-facing bay window and another, smaller window overlooking the side garden, where their son was going back and forth between the trees, checking and double-checking his knots. He’d found the net in the shed. It wasn’t their net, though she supposed it was now; it had come with the house, and had belonged to one or other of the people who had owned this place before them. Finn had commandeered it for the purpose of catching dead, or soon to be dead, birds. Birds, it seemed, were the next great heralders of the apocalypse, and Finn had decided that it was important to catch them in the act of falling. Before the birds, there had been two long weeks of insects: a meticulous recording of spiders, flies, and beetles, tallies of the dead entered each night in a blue-lined copybook. Bill left the window and came to sit beside her at the table. He was wearing an old shirt from his banking days, old but expensive, a Lanvin pinstripe with double cuffs, crumpled because he’d slept in it the night before, and a pair of tracksuit bottoms. He’d stopped getting his hair cut, and now it hung limp and slightly graying just below his ears. “Will you take Finn to school today?” she said. It was half inquiry, half request. “We’ll see,” he said. “We don’t want to rush things, do we?” He took one of the books from the floor beside his chair. It was one she hadn’t seen before, a hardback with a picture of an ornate karyōbinga on the cover, and she looked away to spare herself seeing the price. They were all over the house, these books, and journals, too, little dog-eared towers of them in the bathroom and next to their bed, copies surfacing randomly on kitchen shelves and windowsills. They were about art, mostly: Oriental art, Japanese antiquities, Muromachi paintings, wooden carvings detailed with gold leaf and lacquer. They were the kind of books she might once have bought for herself, books she could still possibly take pleasure in were they not so hideously expensive. “It’s been almost a month,” she said. “He needs to go back to school. His suspension ended more than a week ago.” Bill didn’t answer immediately. Instead, he turned a page with ceremonial reverence, lifting the glossy paper, letting it fall, smoothing a hand across a monotone print depicting a line of leafless trees fronting a temple. “I don’t think he’s ready,” he said. He gestured toward the garden, where Finn was leaning into the net, resting his weight on it, testing it. “Look at him. Isn’t he happy?” Her coat was on the back of her chair, and she took it, draped it across her shoulders. It was cold, this room, even in April, even with the chimney blocked up and insulating tape sealing the splintered frames of the sash windows, the original windows, as the auctioneer had pointed out, practically salivating at the sheer oldness of it all, as she had, too, back then. It was easier for Bill if Finn didn’t go to school, she thought; that way he didn’t have to walk with the child to the bus stop, and then ride the bus with him into town, didn’t have to make his way back, only to repeat the journey when school finished in the afternoon. “Astonishing, when you consider it,” he said. “The deep recession into space.” “Sorry?” she said, before realizing that he was talking about something in the book. He was off then, feeding her random pieces as he read, while she ate a slice of toast and drank her coffee. Above the table, a lead-crystal chandelier hung like a tree in winter, most of its pendants missing. She should take it down and be done with it, she thought. She should put it out in the shed with the rest of the rubbish and pick up something at IKEA. She’d imagined a life for the people who’d lived here before, had pieced it together from the things they’d left behind—the skeleton of a pony trap, its metal spine rusting at the back of the shed, the stone hot-water jars. But it occurred to her now that perhaps she’d gone about it wrong, that perhaps they were to be known not by what they left but by what they took, in which case she would never know them. Outside the window, Finn was throwing stones of varying size into the center of the net. “If you do decide to take him to school,” she said, “I found his school tie when I was tidying the playroom. It’s hanging in his wardrobe.” “O.K.,” he said, without looking up, and she knew there would be no school for Finn today. This is what she’d told Finn about the ducks: yesterday, in Stephen’s Green, the ducks on one of the ponds had died, the smaller pond with the gunmetal-green railings by the side exit to the shopping center, not one or two of the ducks but all of them. She’d seen them as she cut through the park on her way to the office, stopping where a small crowd had gathered. And Bill was right: it was no story for a child, especially not this child, so sensitive that sometimes she thought the very passage of air around him might strip the skin off him. But she’d arrived home late, and tired, and, on entering the kitchen and seeing them together in easy silence at the table, she’d felt a need to announce herself, to offer something that might allow access to their world. And so she’d unleashed it, the story of the ducks, how some were almost wholly submerged, just the tip of a wing or a tail feather breaking the surface of the water, while others lay on the bank, their jewelled heads pressing beak-shaped indents into the silt. One had made it onto the grass and lay toppled beneath the spiked branches of a hawthorn bush, and she knew that if she touched it it would still be warm. All the time she was talking, Finn was looking at her, and she could almost hear the thoughts whirring inside his head. Bill had raised an eyebrow as he dished out mashed potatoes and peas, the only dinner that Finn could be persuaded to eat. She’d looked toward the oven to see if perhaps he had cooked something else for her. He’d followed her gaze. “I could do you an egg if you like,” he said. “It’s O.K.,” she said. “This is fine.” She would like to know how exactly Bill passed his days, but this mystery was as unfathomable to her as the lives of the house’s previous inhabitants. It was not as if he spent much time on home maintenance. He’d had business cards printed advertising his services as a financial consultant, but thus far no clients had materialized. She’d taken a seat opposite Finn at the kitchen table and watched him eat his food the way he always did: peas first, one by one, then the potatoes, all the time his small brow furrowed with such intensity that she imagined the ducks resurrected inside his head, waddling crookedly, beating their wings against the walls. She slipped her arms into her coat, took her briefcase from the hall, and went outside, to where her car was parked in front of the house. “Bye, Finn,” she called, and raised her hand in a wave. He waved back, then returned to the task of untying one of the strings. Setting down her briefcase, she crossed the lawn, the heels of her shoes sinking into the damp ground, and stopped beside the net. For a moment, she considered what it might be like to climb onto it, to close her eyes, to sleep. Finn had managed to work the string loose, and now he was circling the tree with it again, but at a point higher up, round and round, preparing to refasten it. He stopped when it would go no further and began to tie a knot. “Here,” she said, “let me do that.” “It has to be a pipe-hitch knot,” he said. “Can you do a pipe hitch?” She shook her head. “I’d better leave you to it, then,” she said. “Which is the genetically modified corn?”Buy the print » Sheets of paper were spread out on the grass. Stooping to get a better look, she saw that they were covered in complex, intricate diagrams, the margins scribbled with words like “plague” and “apocalypse” and little hand-drawn pictures of birds, small, fat-bellied things with disproportionately long legs and large feet. Among the drawings was a copy of a magazine, a publication brought to the house from time to time by a preacher woman. She was one of the few people who braved the muddy lane to visit them or, more precisely, to visit Bill and Finn, because she always called in the daytime. “Was the preacher here?” she said, picking up the magazine. “You mean Molly?” Since when was he on first-name terms with the preacher woman? “Is that what she’s called?” “Yes.” He’d completed the knot, and was tugging on the ends to see if it would hold. “So when was Molly here?” “Yesterday. But she couldn’t stay long. She had to go visit a woman who’s come all the way from Virginia to live up by the lake.” Satisfied with the knot, he turned to his mother. “Virginia is a girl’s name,” he said, “but it’s also a place in America. The first peanuts ever grown in America were grown in Virginia, but now the people of Virginia mostly grow tobacco, which is immoral and also causes plagues.” “What’s Molly like?” she said, conscious that she should be on the road already. Delay would be paid for at an extortionate rate; ten minutes could cost her an hour if she hit the M50 at the wrong time. Finn considered for a moment. “You know Sally, the horse trainer on ‘Blue Mountain’?” “Blue Mountain? Where’s that?” “It’s a TV program.” When she shook her head, he tried again. “You know Princess Karla, from ‘The Jupiter Gang’?” What on earth were these programs that Bill was letting him watch? She would book a day off next month, she decided; even a half day would do. She would make an appointment with the school principal, she would ring a child psychologist, she would return the calls of that woman from the bank. There was no longer any reason to hope Bill might do these things. Finn had his eyes screwed up, concentrating. “You know Angelina Jolie?” he said. Goodness, she thought, this Evangelical was not what she had in mind. What she had in mind—an image she knew to be stereotypical, ridiculous—was a middle-aged matronly woman in homely dress, nineteenth-century Mormon meets Catholic nun, with gray hair in a bun and mannish lace-up shoes. “Yes,” she said. “I know Angelina Jolie. Is that who she’s like?” “Sort of,” he said. “She’s got hair like her, and eyes like her, but she’s not as tall. And her skin is more tanned.” It was nonsensical to be jealous of a woman who had made it her life’s purpose to decry pride and vanity and sins of the flesh, to decry most things, if the magazines she delivered were anything to go by. She went to put the magazine in her briefcase, but the boy snatched it from her and, going a little distance away, he settled himself cross-legged in the grass. She watched him as he read: such a serious child, serious, fervent, and, though it pained her to admit it, strange. She went over and stood beside him. “We are living in the last of days,” he said, without looking up. “Soon, the armies of the Beast will come, and there will be pestilence and lakes of fire.” “Give me that,” she said, reaching for the magazine, but he was too quick for her. Jumping up, he took off to the far end of the garden, pages fluttering in his hand as he ran. She looked at her watch: there was no time to go after him. “I’ll see you this evening,” she called, as she walked back across the grass to her car. She drove down the avenue, swerving around the deepest of the potholes, slowing through the shallower ones. On her right, in contrast to the mossy stone wall, a crude post-and-rail fence separated their property from the wasteland next door, which had once formed part of the house’s extensive grounds. A developer, having no use for the house itself, had fenced it off and sold it, together with an acre of garden. When she and Bill had first viewed it, there had been a pair of tall wrought-iron gates at the end of the avenue, but by the time they moved in the gates were gone, taken, she’d learned later, by a creditor of the builder. The wasteland was meant to be Phase 2 of a development of three-bed semis. Last winter, a storm had felled the advertising hoardings along the perimeter and now they lay half buried in the grass, their peeling fragments of swings and smiling lovers and flowerbeds like remnants of an ancient mosaic. Phase 1 was a field distant, a ghost estate already sliding into dereliction. She’d heard that a few of the houses were occupied, despite being without plumbing or electricity, and once, when she’d crossed the wasteland to peer through the fence, she’d seen a van parked outside one and a mound of refuse sacks outside another. Three weeks ago, during geography class, Finn had struck the boy who sat beside him square on the mouth. “For no apparent reason,” according to the headmaster, though it later transpired that the boy had put his hand on Finn’s arm to stop him jigging it up and down. “That constituted assault,” Bill said. “Finn was acting in self-defense.” “They’re nine-year-old boys,” she’d said. “Can we stop talking about them like they’re on indictment?” There had, apparently, been a lot of blood, a degree of panic, and a lost tooth, though it turned out that the tooth was a milk tooth and would have been lost anyway. “Hardly the point,” the headmaster had said, when Bill offered this, and she couldn’t help thinking that the suspension might have been one week rather than two had she gone on her own. At midday, she took her lunch to the park. The day was cool, with barely any sun, and there were plenty of benches free. She chose one beneath a tree and unwrapped her sandwich. A van from the Parks Department pulled up beside the small pond and reversed onto the grass. A warden got out, and, going around to the back of the van, unbolted the doors and let down the ramp. From where she sat, she could hear him making a series of cooing, coaxing noises. Eventually, a duck plodded out, dazedly, as if the van were a hard-shelled futuristic egg from which it had just hatched. It stood, bemused, on the ramp for a moment, and then suddenly there were more ducks behind it, pushing and jostling, and it was too late for it to turn back. A dozen of them, maybe more, descended onto the grass, a mixture of lustrous greens and blues and mottled browns, and, as the warden herded them toward the water, a child began to throw bread, striking one of them on the head. The warden shooed them onward, and they were wading in now, swimming, moving in tight little circles before broadening their orbit. They should have made her happy, but they didn’t. They were indistinguishable from the ducks that had died the day before. If she hadn’t cut through the park yesterday morning, if she hadn’t taken lunch here today, she might even have thought, next time she visited, that they were the same ducks. There was trickery of a sort at work, a sleight of hand that suggested that the first ducks had never existed, and only she alone, in silent witness, knew better. She put the remainder of her sandwich in the bin and, leaving the park, made her way back to her office. Later, at her computer, she typed “Stephen’s Green ducks dead” into a search engine, but her inquiry yielded nothing of relevance. She was driving home shortly after 6 P.M. with the radio set to a music station. She liked this stretch of the commute, the city traffic behind her, the winding country roads that led into Portlaoise, then out of it again. There was a particular house that drew her eye each evening, a house of the same period and style as their own, early-nineteenth-century Georgian, but better tended. In winter, candles in glass jars hung from holly trees, and now, in late spring, daffodils bloomed on either side of the long avenue. This evening, as she drove past, she felt not inspired but admonished. If it was still light by the time they finished dinner, she would attempt a clear-up of the beehives in the southwest corner of their property. She would ask Finn to help her; it might take his mind off all things dead. They could paint the hives different colors, use them as planting boxes; she had no desire to keep bees. Items of beekeeping equipment—a suit, a veiled hat, a smoker—had been among the things left behind in the shed, and she’d taken this as evidence that the people who had lived here before were beekeepers, but perhaps it was better evidence that they were not; that they were, at best, failed beekeepers. And for no reason that she could point to she knew that the beekeeping paraphernalia hadn’t belonged to the same person as the pony trap; these things, she was sure, were the leavings of two different people, the discarded parings of two separate lives. “This is money—get ready to worry about it for the rest of your life.”Buy the print » It had rained earlier in the afternoon, a light drizzle, and the three steps that led to the front door were slippery. Above the door, just below the box that housed the burglar alarm, was a domed copper bell. The rope pull was missing, but the metal tongue remained, and she was still startled occasionally, in strong winds, by a shrill, high note. Letting herself into the hall, she thought she detected the smell of something cooking, something other than potatoes and peas. Bill came out of the kitchen to greet her. “Guess what,” he said. “I’ve got an interview.” “That’s great,” she said, trying not to look too surprised, because she’d begun to suspect that he no longer applied for jobs. “What’s it for?” “A position at the museum in Athy.” “The museum?” she said, puzzled. “You mean in the accounts department?” “It’s more hands on,” he said. “Cataloguing exhibits, working on the archives, that sort of thing.” Careful, she warned herself, careful how you play this. Mentally, she had already begun to calculate the cost of his return bus fare, adding to it the cost of new work clothes, the cost of paying someone to mind their son. To buy a little time, she busied herself with hanging her coat on a peg and then, turning to him again, said, “Where’s Finn?” “He’s in the kitchen,” Bill said, “worrying about ducks.” He began to walk back down the hall, and she followed him. “So how much does the job pay?” she asked, doing her best to sound casual. “They said we can discuss salary at the interview.” “But they do actually pay?” “Of course.” He halted in the doorway of the kitchen and frowned. “You could try to sound more pleased,” he said. “You wanted me to get a job. Well, that’s what I’m doing.” She felt like telling him that this had nothing to do with want; that what either of them might have wanted had stopped being relevant a long time ago. “Sorry,” she said, “I just . . . you know . . . When is the interview?” “Tomorrow at four. Which means I’ll need to leave here just after three.” “But who will look after Finn?” “I thought you could take the afternoon off.” “I have appointments,” she said. “If I’d had more notice . . .” She saw then that Finn was sitting at the kitchen table, and that the thing he had on a plate in front of him, which at first glance she’d taken for a soft toy, was in fact a dead bird. Easy does it, she thought, deep breaths. She went over and stood beside him. He looked up from poking the bird with a fork, and smiled. It was small and dark, with black and brown feathers, its pinkish claws curled. “Did you catch it in your net?” she said. She pictured it dropping from the sky, the taut bounce as it rose only to fall back again. “No,” he said, “I found it by the river.” She watched as he plucked a feather from the bird’s belly. “What are you doing?” she said. “It might be diseased.” “It is diseased,” he said. “It’s got plague.” He was pulling out feathers in swift sharp yanks, leaving a clearing of pink-hued skin bubbled with goose bumps. He picked up a knife and prodded the cleared patch as if he were about to make an incision. “O.K.,” she said. “That’s enough, get it off the table right now.” Behind her, Bill was taking something from the oven. It was the first time he had cooked properly in weeks. She watched as he peeled the foil cover from a roasting tin, and when the rush of steam dispersed she saw that it was a chicken. After dinner, Bill disappeared into the room off the kitchen that they used as a TV room. She had abandoned the idea of interesting Finn in the beehives; he’d eaten his potatoes and peas, then taken the feathered cadaver out to the garden, where he sat examining it, so engrossed that she didn’t have the heart to take it from him. She washed up before joining Bill in the TV room. It was a small space that might once have been a maid’s room, and was easier to heat than the larger rooms at the front. Bill was sitting in an armchair, toasting his socked feet on the bars of an electric fire. The husband of one of her colleagues had taken a job in Dubai last year. It was difficult, of course, her colleague had said, but every second month she left the kids with her mother and flew out for a week. In three years’ time, they would be back on their feet; it would be worth it. Looking at Bill now, sitting there reading one of his art journals, she wished that he would go to Dubai, too; it shocked her, the force with which she wished this, as did the composure with which she found herself contemplating it. She went to a cupboard and took out a bottle of brandy left over from Christmas, and poured a measure for herself, another for him. He took the glass from her, but said nothing. “Maybe you could take Finn with you tomorrow?” she said. He looked up from his journal. “Turn up with a kid in tow? I might as well not bother.” And she saw now how this would unfold, how anytime in the future that she hinted he should get a job it would come back to this: he’d wanted to, he’d tried, she’d thwarted it. She took a mouthful of brandy. “I think you should go,” she said. “What about your appointments?” “I can’t get out of the first one, but I’ll ask someone to cover the later ones. Put on one of Finn’s DVDs for him. I’ll be home by three-thirty.” “You mean leave him on his own?” She was tempted to say that it wouldn’t be very different from any other day. As best as she could tell, Bill mostly seemed to leave the boy to his own devices. “It’s only for half an hour,” she said. “He’ll be fine. Give him his lunch before you go.” “I give him his lunch every day,” he said. He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “You really think I should go?” “Yes,” she said, “I do.” “O.K., then,” he said. “I will.” The pony trap had most likely belonged to a woman called Eliza Harriet Smithwick, who, according to the title deeds, had been granted a life interest in the house and a hundred acres as part of a marriage settlement in 1886. An ancestor of hers had acquired the land from the Earl of Mountrath for the princely sum of eighty pounds, ten shillings. Oh, how she and Bill had laughed with the solicitor about that—eighty pounds, ten shillings!—because it was possible for anything to be funny in those days, anything at all. They’d bought in those last few weeks before the crash, when the market, like a ball in flight, had quietly, imperceptibly stopped rising, had hung for a millisecond at the peak of its trajectory before it began to drop. She was thinking about this as she drove too fast up the avenue the following evening, her knuckles white on the steering wheel. It was just after five-fifteen. Nobody had been able to cover her appointments, or, more accurately, nobody had been willing to. It was like that at work lately: everybody pretending busyness, everybody watching, the way children in a parlor game watch the chairs, knowing that the music could stop at any moment. Bill had telephoned at two, inquiring as to the whereabouts of a particular blue shirt. “Be sure to lock the doors,” she’d said, to which he’d replied that he always locked them, this being a downright lie. She didn’t tell him that she’d be late. As it turned out, the front door was locked. Stepping into the hall, she heard canned laughter and the soundtrack of a cartoon. “Hey, Finn,” she called, putting down her briefcase. She hung up her coat and looked into the TV room. A plate of peas was abandoned on the floor beside the armchair. A DVD was playing, but the room was empty. “Finn?” she called again. “Finn, sweetheart, Mom’s home.” He wasn’t in his bedroom, either. She went from room to room upstairs, then downstairs again, where, in the dining room, she noticed the curtains moving and saw that the window was open. She continued to call his name as she circled the house and garden. She climbed through the post-and-rail fence and into the wasteland next door. From where she stood, she could see as far as the rough track that ran along the river, and, in the next field, the rows of unfinished houses. She cupped her hands around her mouth. “Finn!” she shouted. A man was walking at speed along the track, breaking now and again into a run. He veered off and came toward her, his head bent, his hands in the pockets of his anorak. He was in his thirties, she guessed, with straggly brown hair and a reddish-brown beard, a colony of pimples on one cheek. “I heard you calling him,” he said. “I know where he is.” “Where?” she said. “Over there.” He pointed to the houses. “I seen him earlier.” His anorak was torn, and he was wearing dirty gray trainers and no socks. “Thank you,” she said curtly. She took a step forward, but he remained positioned in front of her. “I seen you going off in your car sometimes,” he said. “In the mornings.” Buy the print » She wondered if this was an attempt to intimidate her, but he was grinning, the grin open and a little vacuous, and she decided he was probably harmless. “Yes,” she said, “that’s right. I work in the city.” She stepped around him and walked quickly in an effort to put some distance between them, picking her way over a coil of discarded wire that wound snakelike through the grass. He caught up and walked alongside her, so close that his arm brushed against hers. She would run to one of the occupied houses if he got awkward, she decided; she was nearer to them now than she was to her own house. “Through here,” the man said. He had scurried ahead, and was pulling wide an opening in the chain-link fence. He was as eager as a child, smiling as he held the mesh open, and she noticed that his wrists were frail and thin and scarred. She stooped to fit through the gap, and as she did she felt his hand, briefly, on the small of her back. In the next field, dozens of houses stretched out in front of her. Most of the windows had been smashed, and they stood blind in the late-afternoon light, surrounded by weeds and litter. There, still, were the refuse sacks she remembered from before, but there was no van, nothing to suggest that anyone was living here. The man led her across ground strewn with cans and broken glass to a house in the middle of a row. “In here,” he said, climbing over a window ledge, but she shook her head. The earth beneath the ledge was churned up, indented with footprints of various sizes. “Where’s my son?” she said. The man was standing in what had likely been intended as a sitting room. The floor was rough concrete, and seeds blown into its crevices had taken root, weeds pushing up through cracks. She saw in one corner a mug that belonged to Finn and next to it the jacket that her sister had given him for his birthday. How long had he been coming to this place? she wondered. How long had he been hanging out with this man? Because the man’s belongings were here, too—clothes, cardboard boxes, a sleeping bag—all piled in the center of the room. She took a deep breath. “You told me you saw him,” she said. “Now, can you please tell me where he is?” He picked up a metal rod from a pile of rubbish and struck it on the floor a couple of times. Swinging it back and forth, he crossed the room to the fireplace. She saw then that a thing she had taken for a bundle of rags was a dog stretched out, dead, its head at an odd angle to its body. There was a large bald circle on its back and, in the center of the circle, a wine-colored spot, like a birthmark, fading into softer reds and pinks as it radiated outward. Gripping the rod in both hands, the man raised it high, then brought it down again, piercing the dog through the stomach. “Where is he?” she screamed, banging the window ledge with her fist. “What have you done with him?” He stared at her blankly and rubbed the back of one hand across his eyes, as if he’d just woken. “He was here this morning,” he said. She turned and ran, back to the gap in the fence, tripping on the way, falling and tearing her tights. Her hands were shaking as she struggled to part the wire mesh and squeeze through. When she’d gone a little distance, she stopped to catch her breath. She looked behind to see if the man was following, but there was no sign of him. She stood for a moment and tried to think what to do. It was possible that while she’d been here Finn had returned home, climbed back in through the window, and was there now, waiting for her, or for his father, who would be home shortly. It was also possible that he was down by the river, searching for dead things, so absorbed in his activities that he hadn’t heard her. Other possibilities crowded in on the heels of these, but she pushed them aside. She looked toward their house and saw it as a stranger might: an abandoned outpost, stately but diminished, plundered. The sun had moved lower in the sky, and now it caught the glass of the windows, causing them to blaze as if they’d been set alight. For a moment, she imagined she saw the face of a woman pressed against a pane. What became of Eliza Harriet Smithwick, she wondered, and what would she think if she saw what had been done to her house and her gardens. She became aware of a stinging pain in her leg and, looking down, noticed that her knee was bleeding. “Finn!” she shouted. And then she heard it: a yell, a small, joyous bellow of trumpeting delight that was her son’s voice, coming from the direction of the river. She turned and saw him cresting the grassy embankment above the water, sun reflecting off the near-white blond of his hair. She began to run toward him. He had a stick in his hand, and he was waving it in the air like a sword and making whooping noises. She was within a dozen yards of him before she realized that he was not alone. Lying on the grass, reading, was a slim, tanned woman of about thirty. Sunlight filtered through the trees, parting the shadows along the bank, streaking her long hair. The woman raised her eyes from her book. It was a Bible bound in brown leather, and before she closed it and sat up she marked her page with a yellow ribbon. “Hello,” she said, shading her eyes with her hand. “Isn’t it a glorious day? We thought it a shame to stay indoors.” Finn waved to his mother but didn’t go to her. He seated himself next to the woman and picked up a magazine from a pile on the ground. Was it possible that they could have been here all this time and not heard her calling? She was conscious of her torn tights, her bleeding leg, the incongruity of her tailored jacket and pencil skirt, here where everything was peaceful, where sunlight dappled her child’s blond head and weeds in flurries of blue and white bloomed along the riverbank. She crouched beside her son and hugged him. “Finn,” she said, “I was so worried about you.” He smiled but, shrugging away her arms, continued to read. Not knowing what to do, she settled herself next to him, tucking her legs underneath her to hide the bloodied knee. The preacher woman’s legs were bare, she noticed, bare and brown. She wondered if Finn had simply climbed out the window to the woman or if she, before luring him, Pied Piper style, across the fields, had climbed in. She pictured her going from room to room, sitting at the mahogany table under the ravaged chandelier, her green catlike eyes, which, yes, were ridiculously like Angelina Jolie’s, taking in all the brokenness. “We come down here sometimes when the weather is good,” the woman said. “Finn knows the names of everything—insects, birds, plants. He’s a walking encyclopedia.” Stay away from my son, she wanted to say, stay away from him with your beasts and your lakes of fire and your pestilence. Instead, she said, “Yes, he’s an exceptionally bright child.” And, because in the silence that followed it seemed that something more was expected of her, she gestured to a cluster of purple flowers with yellow hearts that grew a few feet away. Possibly, they were violets; she had never been good with plants. “They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” she said. The woman smiled. She picked up her Bible, opening it not to the place she had marked but to a different page, and began to read. “Consider the lilies of the field,” she said, “how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: and yet I say unto you, that even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.” There was a soft, swishing sound, the sound of someone moving through long grass. Bill was making his way toward them across the wasteland, his jacket thrown over one shoulder, his gait relaxed, unhurried. “Dad!” Finn shouted, and he jumped up and ran to his father. She kept her eyes on her husband until she knew he was near enough to have seen her, and when he didn’t wave or call out she turned away. She lay back on the grass and looked up. A flock of small birds, starlings perhaps, were flying in an arrow formation above the trees. As she watched, they drew close together to form a dark, quivering orb. For a moment, they appeared freeze-framed, as if someone had pressed pause, and, just as she thought that they would surely fall, they scattered like gunshot across the evening sky.

Louise knew by the new name on the call box that someone had moved in. She’d seen lights and movement in the apartment, which was across the courtyard from her and Martin, for the past few days. The new name confirmed it. Someone had finally bought the place. The name had been typed on a small piece of green paper and taped to the call box beside the apartment’s number. Louise had once known a man with the name Jahani. Arman had been a doctoral student in French the year she started at Stockholm University. He’d taught the conversation tutorial she took fall term. She looked at the green paper again. All that was so long ago. He was the second man she’d slept with. Martin still didn’t know about it. She checked her watch. She was on her way out to meet her son, Jonas, for lunch. The metro she wanted to take was due in ten minutes. Arman had come from Iran to study, or maybe he’d come to escape the revolution. She couldn’t recall the details now. The years merged into one another. A bus rushed past on the street, and the blast of hot air stung her neck. Jonas wanted to try a sushi restaurant he’d heard about. They took a table on the patio. It was September but very warm out. She let him order. Arman had died in the early nineties. He was a professor of French at the university by then, and his death had been noted briefly in the culture section of DN. One of his books about French cognates had caused a minor controversy. His obituary had mentioned two children, she believed, a daughter and a son. Maybe one of them had moved into her building. “News from home,” she said after the waitress had brought their drinks—water for Jonas, white wine for Louise. Jonas hadn’t lived with Louise and Martin for more than a decade, but she still thought of the apartment as his home. “The apartment across the courtyard finally sold.” “The neighbor who died?” he said. “Dad mentioned it.” Martin served on the co-op board and would have known about the sale. He rarely shared such information with Louise. “That’s right,” she said. “Barbro Ekman. Her children had been trying to sell the place for months. You can’t imagine the smell when the body was first discovered.” The apartment, which was one floor lower than her and Martin’s, had been empty since Barbro Ekman died, shortly before Christmas the previous year. Her body was found only after Martin, who’d gone up to the attic storage area on that side of the building to retrieve a box of decorations, smelled the decomposition. The air was sour and rotten, even two floors up. He’d been upset that no one in the building had noticed for so long, that no one who lived closer to Barbro Ekman had been alarmed by the overwhelming stench. “They’re all so selfish,” he’d said. But Louise suspected he was really only upset that he’d been the one to make the discovery. Jonas took a drink of his water. “Gruesome,” he said. It had been snowing the day the cleaning company came. She’d watched from her kitchen as they worked. They scrubbed walls and floors, removed furniture. They even took some of the fixtures and appliances from the kitchen. The idea that humans are so unclean on the inside had preoccupied Louise for weeks. “Well,” she told her son, “I can’t imagine what a relief it must be to her family.” “I don’t think I ever met that woman,” Jonas said. “Not that I remember.” “She was very old,” Louise said. She didn’t know if he was telling the truth or saying this only to annoy her. From the bedroom on the courtyard side of their apartment there was a clear view of Barbro Ekman’s living room. When Jonas was young, that bedroom had been his. Now Martin used it as an office. She rarely went into the room anymore. Martin was private about so much. “Do you remember the blue light from her window?” she asked Jonas. “How it used to reflect on the flower box?” “I think so,” he said. “It used to scare you.” He tore open the paper wrapping of the chopsticks, pulled them apart, and rubbed them together to smooth the edges. “It was so easy to explain,” she said. “It was just her television, I always told you. But you never believed me.” The waitress arrived with two rectangular plates and set them down in the center of the table. Colorful pieces of fish were arranged on each plate. Louise had tried to listen to what Jonas had ordered for them both and to follow along by looking at the pictures in her own menu, but now that the food had arrived she couldn’t tell one piece of fish from another. Jonas pointed with his chopsticks. “Salmon,” he said. “And yellowtail. Whitefish. Eel on this plate here.” She’d always disliked eel. Eels could travel great distances out of the water, and she found this disturbing. “Who bought the apartment?” Jonas asked. “I only know a name,” Louise said. Arman had been a good teacher. She could still conjugate several French verbs, hear him reading from lists he’d written on the chalkboard: present indicative, present conditional, present subjunctive. She remembered the strangest things. There couldn’t be that many Jahanis in Stockholm. Jonas was thirty-four. Would she feel jealous or relieved if the person in the apartment was close to that age? She watched her son eat. He talked about a problem at his office. An e-mail had accidentally been sent to the wrong person, and Jonas found this uncomfortably funny. He’d been in his current position for only a year, and everything he said about his job, positive or negative, surged with fresh excitement. When they finished, Jonas insisted on paying the check. As he was figuring out the tip, she typed an e-mail on her phone reminding herself to deposit money into his account. She walked him back to work. They said goodbye to each other outside the building’s glass-walled entryway. Jonas vanished into the crowd of office workers. It was remarkable how similar to her son they all looked. It had been the same when he was in school. The children were all identical. Hundreds of them crowded the spaces of his childhood. His soccer matches, ski lessons, piano classes. She’d always been at ease with the idea of being the mother of a child who was like everyone else. It was a relief to exist so close to the middle. There were so many fewer risks. She watched the crowd fill the lobby. They could all be my children, she thought. She decided to walk home. Systembolaget had a branch near Jonas’s office, and she wanted to buy a bottle of wine. It embarrassed her to buy wine more than twice a week from the same Systembolaget, and she’d been to the location closer to her apartment just the day before. Lately, she’d been interested in South African wines. She picked two bottles of a Cabernet that, according to a sign fastened to the shelf in the store, had ranked very highly in a blind taste test. She paid for the wine, and, as she left the store, she looked up and down the street to see if there was anyone who might recognize her. Then she stuffed the bottles into her purse, concealing what wouldn’t fit all the way in with her scarf, and walked the rest of the way home. The green piece of paper was still there on the call box, partly obscuring the name Ekman. One corner of the paper curled outward in the heat. With her fingernail, she started to peel the tape off so that she could reposition it over the paper, but she stopped herself. The stairwell was dark. Someone on the ground floor was playing music very loudly. The sound faded as she climbed the stairs. By the second floor, she could no longer recognize the song. She set her purse on the kitchen counter. The bottles clinked. It was two, according to the oven clock. Martin was at work. That evening he was going out with colleagues to celebrate his retirement. They were taking him to a karaoke bar. She didn’t expect him to be home until late. Martin was retiring early. They didn’t need the money, and he was bored with work. She opened one of the bottles of wine and poured herself a glass. Sometimes she worried that she was damaging her health. The music was still playing, and it seeped clearly into the kitchen from the open window. She took her wine to the balcony and sat looking out over the courtyard. The curtains in Barbro Ekman’s apartment were drawn, and the apartment was dark. She could hear the music from the ground floor. A new song came on, one she recognized. She mouthed along to a few words of the chorus, took a sip of her wine. The wine tasted good, and the song reminded her of somewhere nice. She couldn’t place the memory exactly, but it made her think of the outdoors, of a beautiful view. There were trees and snow. Maybe the song had played on the radio frequently during a trip they’d once taken. In the apartment just below Barbro Ekman’s place lived a woman named Johanna. Her two sons were grown now. One of them played ice hockey in America, somewhere in the Southern states, Louise thought—North Carolina, maybe. The other was a lawyer up north, in Kiruna. Louise remembered when the family had moved in. The boys were so young. That was right before Louise had become pregnant with Jonas. She’d liked the family. She’d helped the boys plant a small herb garden on her balcony, because it faced east and got good morning sun. Once, about a month before Jonas was born, Johanna had asked Louise to babysit the older of her sons. The younger one was very sick, and Johanna hadn’t wanted to take them both to the hospital. Louise wasn’t feeling well herself and didn’t want to catch whatever the boy had. So she volunteered Martin to go in her place. After barely an hour, he came back. She heard his footsteps in the hall outside their apartment. She heard the front door open and Martin’s heavy tread as he walked to the bedroom. He was tired, he told her, and had forgotten to take a book to read. “Who’s watching him?” she asked. “Has Johanna come home?” The bed was warm and comfortable, and, silhouetted in the doorway, Martin appeared much larger than he actually was. “I need to find my book,” he said. “They have books there,” she said. “And a television.” “I’m tired, Louise,” he said. Then the shadow of her husband stepped out of the doorway and disappeared into the hall. She heard a door open and close, then the airy creak of leather as he settled into his chair in the living room. She got out of bed and wrapped herself in her robe. It was the first time she could remember hating her husband. Over the years that had become such a familiar, even comforting, feeling. It was cold out, and she crossed the courtyard as quickly as she could, taking care to avoid an icy patch where the shadow from a first-floor balcony kept the ground wet even in the warmest part of the day. She could remember so much about that evening, but not what the problem with the younger boy had been. She couldn’t recall Johanna’s coming home. But she distinctly remembered waking up on Johanna’s couch, her throat and stomach on fire with heartburn and hatred for Martin. The next time she saw Johanna, she thought she’d ask her about that night. We all inhabit our memories so differently. Or, rather, our individual memories of shared events can mean such different things. It had something to do with identity, she supposed, but she didn’t feel like chasing after the thought any further. Louise spent the rest of the afternoon on the balcony or else on the narrow, soft couch in the sitting room, reading. Days passed quickly when she drank. By five o’clock, the sun had dipped behind the building to the west, and the temperature dropped. She had nearly finished the first bottle of wine. When her neighbors started to arrive home from their workdays, she went inside and sat at the kitchen island. She was careful about appearances. Sometimes she threw bottles away in her trash, instead of taking them to the recycling, because she didn’t want her neighbors to see how much she drank. Buy the print » She fixed herself something to eat and opened the second bottle of wine. She watched the news while she ate. Dusk settled over the courtyard, and by eight it was dark. She turned the television off and took a thin blanket from the couch and returned to the balcony. She wrapped the blanket around her shoulders. Outside the apartment, she could smell her own inside life sharply on the blanket. The courtyard was dark. She tried to find a pattern in the lit-up windows of the building opposite. Two dark, one light. Three light, one dark, three light. Lights went on and off, and she could never get past a third position in the pattern and soon gave up trying. Occasionally, the front door would open loudly and slam shut. The hall light switched on, casting a wide square of light into the courtyard. She heard voices, a television, laughter. Barbro Ekman’s apartment was still dark. She was the one who’d ended things with Arman. She’d got pregnant, and the idea that the baby might be his had frightened her. Of course, the timing wasn’t quite right. The last time she’d slept with Arman was weeks before the likely conception date. She’d understood this with relief when the midwife had circled the estimated due date on the colorful chart she held in front of Louise and Martin in a cramped exam room at the thirteen-week checkup. Louise felt as if she’d risked something catastrophic and survived. She hadn’t told Arman that she was pregnant. It was better that he didn’t know. Just after the birth, the first time she held Jonas against her chest, feeling the sticky wetness of her own blood on his body, she’d touched his hair, dark, curled wet with blood and amniotic fluid. Until the midwife washed him and gave him back to her, she was terrified that perhaps Jonas was Arman’s after all, that she’d miscalculated some crucial fact. The heavy front door of the building creaked open. The light in the hall came on. It spilled out into the courtyard, revealing a chair and the sharp contrasts of shadowed corners. The door slammed shut. She listened to footsteps in the stairwell. Her wineglass was empty, and she got up to fill it. In the warmth of the apartment, she felt a chill at her feet. She filled her glass and held the bottle up in front of her to check how much wine was left. Just over half. She took the bottle with her back to the balcony and sat in the darkness. She was warm and didn’t need the blanket. The lights in Barbro Ekman’s apartment had been turned on. Through the curtains, she saw movement. She watched the windows closely. There were three, spaced evenly from one end of the building to the other. Kitchen, living room, bedroom. There was a bathroom and a small dining room on the other side of the apartment. She knew this because she’d once been inside, years before, to help Barbro Ekman move a painting from the hallway to the bedroom. Barbro Ekman had been dead for eight months. She was a young ghost. Louise watched the figure move from window to window, its dark shape heavy in the living room, where the light was brightest, faint in the bedroom. Martin wouldn’t be home for hours. He never came home when he said he was going to. She couldn’t remember how Arman Jahani had died. Probably some disease. Most people die in unassuming ways like that. Quiet but painful struggles consisting of medicines and doctor visits, hope established and quickly abandoned. It was so boring. Better to die as Barbro Ekman had. By the time Jonas was two or three, she’d nearly forgotten that she once thought he might be Arman’s son. She couldn’t remember what it had been like to feel any guilt about it. The wine was good, but it had left a sticky film in her mouth, and she didn’t want the rest. She got up to find something else to drink. In the kitchen, she poured herself a glass of Scotch from the bottle that Martin saved for guests and special occasions. She didn’t like Scotch, particularly, but this tasted good. It stung her throat. She coughed, took another sip. What would it have been like to raise Arman’s son? Without imagining any details, she felt the idea forming, shapely and full, and was able to hold it firmly in her mind for just a moment. But did it matter? Arman was dead. That was the simplest truth of all. Would Martin have figured it out? He’d been a good father, a little distant, a little too rooted in his work, perhaps, but that was normal. Jonas had had a good childhood. She was happy she hadn’t had to carry a lie as big as his life all this time. She emptied her glass, winced, searched the burn of the Scotch in her throat for pleasure. On the balcony, she filled the empty glass with the rest of the wine and sat in her chair and drank. In Barbro Ekman’s apartment, Arman’s real child was alive. It was funny how her path and Arman’s—such a ridiculous metaphor—had converged. He would have found it amusing. She was sure of it. The figure appeared in the kitchen, pulled the curtains to one side, and opened the window. Arman had a daughter. Louise watched her sit at the table, the light from the lamp forming a bright circle at its center. She was drinking something from a mug. Coffee or tea, maybe wine, Louise thought. She and Martin had lived in the building longer than everyone but grouchy old Jan Lindblom down on the ground floor, and Barbro Ekman, of course, before she died. Back in the kitchen, Louise poured another finger of whiskey. It tasted a little like wine, but it wasn’t bad. In the cupboard, she found an unopened package of cookies. Shortbread, the kind Martin liked. The stairwell was dark. She took the first steps carefully, her hand against the smooth wall as a guide. As she descended, her eyes adjusted and the moonlit courtyard cast its light up into the stairwell, and eventually she could walk without fear of falling. Outside, she looked up at her balcony. The light from her kitchen was inviting, soft orange and yellow. Warm colors. She would never do this sober. The name was on the mail slot on the door. Jahani. She knocked. Footsteps. The young woman answered. She was beautiful, as far from the middle as Louise’s son was near it. “Hello,” she said. “I live here,” Louise said. “I’m sorry?” the young woman said. “I meant I live in this complex, and I wanted to welcome you.” “That’s very nice,” the young woman said. “Thank you so much.” She looked back into the apartment. Louise peered in, too. There were open boxes, a tilting stack of blankets and towels, an empty bookcase turned at a funny angle at the end of the hall. “I was unpacking.” She smiled. Louise could tell that she was embarrassed. Louise smiled back and didn’t budge. “You’ve just moved in,” she said. “Officially tomorrow,” the young woman said. “Getting a head start. Sara,” she said, and held out her hand. “Yuck! Look at all that planet lice down there!”Buy the print » Louise took it. “Louise,” she said. It was difficult to recall exactly what Arman had looked like. Perhaps she could see him in Sara. But had he been tall? Sara was tall, taller than Louise. He’d had dark hair, and she remembered him as very thin, but also strong. Sinewy was the word for it. He’d had thick veins on his arms. “I live just over there,” she said. She held the box of cookies out to indicate the direction of her apartment. Sara looked at her. “Oh, listen to me,” Louise said, handing the cookies to Sara. “These are for you. Welcome.” “You didn’t have to do that,” Sara said. “Of course,” Louise said. “I wanted to. You’re one of us now.” Sara smiled. Louise’s face and the top of her chest were warm. She touched her fingertips to her throat. “You’ll like living here,” she said. “I think so, too,” Sara said. Louise didn’t believe in fate. Every morning she woke up with the thought that that day would be the one when something terrible was destined to happen. She did this because she knew it was impossible to predict what was coming for each of us. Whatever she believed would happen that day she knew would not, owing to our inability to know the future. Lately, she’d been imagining horrific things. Car accidents, robberies, disease. Martin thought it was unhealthy and told her so frequently. “This is a good area,” she said to the young woman. “We’ve been here for years. It’s very safe.” Sara fidgeted at the door. “I like this neighborhood. I always have.” She held the cookies in front of her, took a step back into the apartment, smiled politely, and put her hand on the door. “You could be my daughter,” Louise said. “Excuse me?” Sara said. She let her hand fall from the door. “I could have been your mother. I knew your father before you were born.” Sara squinted a little, turned her head slightly to the left. “You’ve mistaken me for someone else.” “Your father and I were friends,” Louise said. “We had a relationship.” “I think you’ve mistaken me for someone.” Louise reached out and touched Sara’s arm. “It was a long time ago. I was in love with him.” Sara smiled, and in the smile Louise, even drunk, located judgment. This was how Jonas looked at her; Martin, too. The same sad eyes, the narrow, thin-lipped smile. They pitied her, thought she was ridiculous, incapable, unwell. She hated them all. “A woman died here,” she said. Sara started to push the door closed. “Thank you again,” she said. “I really should get back to unpacking.” “She was very old, the woman who lived here before you,” Louise said, stepping forward until she’d nearly entered the apartment. “Her body was found just before Christmas last year. I think she had a stroke.” “I’m sorry,” Sara said. “I thought you should know,” Louise said. “I’d want to know.” She put her hand on the door. Sara looked at her, and Louise saw the pity again. “Are you feeling all right?” Sara said. “Her name was Barbro,” Louise said. She closed her eyes. “The woman who used to live here. She was very old. I think that’s the best way to go, don’t you? In your sleep, just like that. I don’t want to sit around waiting for it.” “Can I help you get back home?” Sara said. “Do you think you’ll make it on your own?” “They’ve cleaned your apartment. You can’t imagine the smell. Martin told me about it.” “Do you need help walking back?” Louise concentrated on holding her head as still as possible. “No,” she said. “It’s just over there.” In the courtyard, she looked up at Barbro Ekman’s apartment. The blinds were drawn. The light in the front room had been turned out. She was cold. She turned on the light in the stairwell, listened to her shoes click and shuffle against the hard stone. From one of the ground-floor apartments, loud applause and laughter from a television mocked her. She steadied herself with a hand on the cold wall. She sat at the kitchen island, on one of the tall stools, the wobbly one, and finished the food she’d prepared earlier. She ate most of a piece of bread with too much butter and drank more Scotch. Arman Jahani had not had a daughter. She was sure of this. It was late, and she was tired. Martin would be home soon, and she wanted to be in bed before he arrived. She stood up to pour herself a glass of milk. Milk soothed her stomach. She would be hungover in the morning, but she didn’t care. She reached for a glass on the far side of the counter, and, as she leaned forward, she brushed the plate off the counter and to the floor. Shattered fragments of china pricked her bare feet. The plate was not a plate. It was only dozens of pieces of thick ceramic, the patterned lines and shapes disrupted, taken apart, put back together to form something new. She got down on her knees and moved the largest piece to one side and began to place the smaller pieces on top. The edges were sharp, and she held each piece as tenderly as possible. She knew it was Martin before he even opened the door. And when he entered the room she didn’t need to look up to see that she’d been right. “I’ve made a mess,” she said. She pushed the plate aside and picked up a bit of bread with her fingertips and put the bread in her mouth. “You don’t have to do that,” Martin said. “Please. I’ll get it later.” “Forgive me.” “I’ll help you to bed,” Martin said. “You should have stayed, Martin. You could have stayed. It wasn’t difficult.” She felt his hand on her head. He probably didn’t know what night she was talking about, but that didn’t matter. She leaned forward, devoted, filling her mouth with the bread as if she were kneeling at the altar of a darkened church.

February 3rd was a dark and dank day: cold spitting rain all morning and a low, steel-gray sky in the afternoon. At four, Jim persuaded his wife, Annie, to go out to do her shopping before full darkness fell. He closed the door behind her with a gentle wave. His hair was thinning, and he was missing a canine on the right side, but he was nevertheless a handsome man who, at thirty-two, might have passed for twenty. Heavy brows and deep-set, dark-lashed eyes that had been making women catch their breath since he was sixteen. Even if he’d grown bald and toothless, the eyes would have served him long into his old age. His overcoat was on the hall tree beside the door. He lifted it and rolled it lengthwise against his thighs. Then he fitted it over the threshold, tucking the cloth of the sleeves and the hem as well as he could into the space beneath the door. Theirs was a railroad flat: kitchen in the back, then dining room, living room, and bedroom in the front. He needed only to push the heavy couch a few feet along the wall to block his wife’s return. He stood on the seat to check that the glass transom above the door was closed. Then he stepped down. He straightened the lace on the back of the couch and brushed away the shallow impression his foot had made on the horsehair cushion. In the kitchen, he pressed his cheek to the cold enamel of the stove and slid his hand into the tight space between it and the yellow wall until he found the rubber hose that connected the oven to the gas tap. He pulled at it as vigorously as he could, given the confined space. There was a satisfying pop, and a hiss that quickly faded. He straightened up with the hose in his hand. The kitchen window looked into the gray courtyard, where, on better days, there were lines of clothes baking in the sun, although the floor of the courtyard, even in the prettiest weather, was a junk yard and a jungle. There were rats and bedsprings and broken crates, a tangle of city-bred vegetation. Once, Annie, sitting on the windowsill with a clothespin in her mouth and a basket of wet linen at her feet, saw a man drag a small child through the muck and tie him to the pole that held the line. She watched the man take off his belt, and, with the first crack of it against the child’s bare calves, she began to yell. Leaning halfway out the window, she threatened to call the police, the fire department, the Gerrity Society. The man glanced up briefly, as if noticing a change in the weather, and then untied the sobbing child and dragged him away. “I know who you are,” Annie cried. Although she didn’t. When Jim ran into the kitchen at the sound of her shouting, she was out the window to her waist, with only one toe on the kitchen floor. He’d had to put his hands on her hips to ease her out of danger. Just one more of what had turned out to be too many days that he hadn’t gone in to work or had arrived too late for his shift. His trouble was with time. Bad luck for a trainman, even on the B.R.T. His trouble was that he liked to refuse time. He delighted in refusing it. He would come to the end of a long night, to the inevitability of 5 a.m., and, while other men, poor sheep, gave in every morning, turning from the pleasures of sleep or drink or talk or love to the duties of the day, he would continue as he willed. “I’m not going,” he’d murmur. “I won’t be constrained.” Two weeks ago, he’d been discharged for unreliability and insubordination. The man Jim was inside—not the blushing, humiliated boy who’d stood ham-handed before the bosses—had shaken off the blow and turned away. But Annie had wept when he told her, and then said angrily, through her tears, that there was a baby coming, knowing even as she said it that to break the news to him in this way was to condemn the child to a life of trouble. He took the tea towels she had left to dry by the sink, wound them into ropes, and placed them along the windowsill. He carried the length of rubber tubing through the living room and into the bedroom. He slipped off his shoes and put the tube to his mouth as if to pull smoke. He had seen this in a picture book somewhere: a fat sultan on a red pillow, doing much the same. He sat on the edge of the bed. He bowed his head and prayed: now and at the hour of our death. He lay back on the bed. He noticed that the room had grown dimmer still. Hour of our. Our hour. He remembered his mother, the picture book spread out on her wide lap. Within this very hour he would put his head on her shoulder once again. Or would he? Would this effort to prove himself his own man—to prove that the hours of his life belonged to himself alone—bar him from Heaven? Did he believe in Heaven? There were moments when his faith fell out from under him like a trapdoor. He stood up. Found his nightshirt beneath his pillow and twisted it, too. Then placed it along the edge of the bedroom window, again pushing the material into the narrow crevice where the frame met the sill, knowing all the while that the gesture was both ineffectual and unnecessary. Down in the street, there was a good deal of movement. Dark coats and hats. A baby buggy or two, the wheels churning up a pale spray. When he turned back to the room, the light had failed in every corner, and he had to put out his hand to feel his way around the bed to his own side. He stretched out. Playfully lifted the hose to one eye, as if to see along its length the black corridor of a subway tunnel, lit gold at the end by the station ahead. Then he closed his eyes and swallowed. Outside, a mother called to a child. There was the slow clopping of a horse-drawn cart. Something dropped to the floor in the apartment upstairs—a sewing basket, perhaps. There was a thud and then a scratchy chorus of wooden spools spinning. Or maybe it was coins, spilled from a fallen purse. At six, the street lamps gave a polish to the wet windowpanes and the scattered black puddles in the street. Lamplight was reflected as well on the rump of a fire truck, and on the pale faces of a gathered crowd, with an extra sparkle on those who wore glasses—Sister St. Savior, for instance, a Little Sister of the Sick Poor, who had spent the afternoon collecting alms in the vestibule of the Woolworth’s at Borough Hall. She was now on her way back to the convent, her bladder full, her ankles swollen, her round lenses turned toward the street light and the terrible scent of doused fire on the winter air. The house where the fire had been looked startled: the windows of all four floors were wide open, shade cords and thin curtains flailing in the cold wind. Although the rest of the building was dark, the vestibule at the top of the stone stoop was weirdly lit, crowded with policemen and firemen carrying lamps. Sister St. Savior wanted only to walk on, to get to her convent, her room, her toilet, but still she brushed through the crowd and climbed the steps. There was a limp fire hose running along the shadowy base of the bannister. Two of the officers in the hallway, turning to see her, tipped their hats and put out their hands as if she had been summoned. “Sister,” one of them said. He was flushed and perspiring, and even in the dull light she could see that the cuffs of his jacket were singed. “Right in here.” The apartment was filled with people and the heavy drone of whispered conversation. There were two groups: one was gathered around a middle-aged man in shirtsleeves and carpet slippers who was sitting in a chair by the window, his face in his hands. The other, across the room, was tending to a woman stretched out on a dark couch, under a fringed lamp that was not lit. She had a cloth applied to her forehead, but she seemed to be speaking sensibly to the thin young man who leaned over her. When she saw the nun, the woman raised a limp hand and said, “She’s in the bedroom, Sister.” Her arm from wrist to elbow was glistening with a shiny salve—butter, perhaps. “You might leave off with that grease,” Sister said. “Unless you’re determined to be basted.” The young man turned at this. He wore a gray fedora and had a milk tooth in his grin. “Have the courtesy to doff your hat,” she told him. It was Sister St. Savior’s vocation to enter the homes of strangers, mostly the sick and the elderly, to breeze into their apartments and sail comfortably through their rooms, to open their linen closets or their china cabinets or their bureau drawers, but the frequency with which she inserted herself into the homes of strangers had not diminished over the years her initial impulse to shade her eyes. She dipped her head as she passed through the parlor into a narrow corridor, but she saw enough to conclude that this was the home of a Jewish woman: the woman on the couch, she was certain; Jewish, she guessed, because of the fringed lampshade, the upright piano against the far wall, the dark oil paintings in the narrow hallway that seemed to depict two ordinary peasants, not saints. A place unprepared for visitors, arrested, as things so often were, by crisis and tragedy, in the midst of what should have been a private hour. She saw, as she passed by, that there was a plate on the small table in the kitchen, that it contained half a piece of bread, bitten and stained with a dark gravy. A glass of tea on the edge of a folded newspaper. In the candlelit bedroom, two more policemen were conferring in a corner. There were dark stockings hung over the back of a chair, a gray corset on the threadbare carpet at the foot of the bed. There was a girl on the bed, her face to the wall, her dark skirt spread out around her, as if she had fallen there from some height. Another woman leaned over her, a hand on the girl’s shoulder. “He’s a heavyweight, but he’d prefer to leave it at that.”Buy the print » The policemen nodded at the nun, and the shorter one took off his cap as he moved toward her. He, too, was singed about the cuffs. He had a heavy face and bad dentures, but there was compassion in the way he gestured with his short arms, toward the girl on the bed, toward the ceiling and the upstairs apartment, where the fire had been, a compassion that seemed to weigh down his limbs. Soft-hearted, Sister thought, one of us. The girl, he said, had come in from her shopping and found the door to her place blocked from the inside. She went to her neighbors, the man next door and the woman who lived here. They helped her push the door open and then the man lit a match to hold against the darkness. There was an explosion. Luckily, he, the policeman, was just at the corner and was able to put the fire out, while neighbors carried the three of them down here. Inside the apartment, in the bedroom, he had found a young man on the bed, dead. Asphyxiated. The girl’s husband. Sister St. Savior drew in her breath, blessed herself. “He fell asleep, poor man,” she said gently. “The pilot light must have gone out.” The officer glanced over his shoulder, toward the bed, and then took the Sister’s elbow and walked her out to the narrow hall. Now they stood in the kitchen doorway. “He killed himself,” the officer whispered, his breath sour, as if in reaction to the situation he was obliged to report. “Turned on the gas. Lucky he didn’t take everyone else with him.” Sister accepted the information with only a discreet nod. When she looked up again—her eyes behind her glasses were small and brown and caught the light the way only a hard surface would, marble or black tin, nothing watery—the truth of the suicide was both acknowledged and put away. She had entered the homes of strangers and seen the bottles in the bin, the poor contents of a cupboard, the bruise in a hidden place, seen as well, once, a pale, thumb-size infant in a basin filled with blood and had bowed her head and nodded in just the same way. “What’s the girl’s name?” she asked. The officer frowned. “Mc-Something. Annie they called her. Irish extraction,” he added. “That’s why I thought to call for you.” Sister smiled. “Is that so?” she said. They both knew he was lying. No one had called for her. She had been on her way home, merely passing by. She dipped her head again, forgiving him his vanity—hadn’t he said, too, that he’d put out the fire himself? “I’ll go to her, then,” she said. As she stepped away, she saw the milk-toothed young man, still in his hat, approach the officer. “Hey, O’Neil!” he shouted. No courtesy in him. Inside the shadowed bedroom, the neighbor woman who stood at the bedside had her eyes elsewhere, on the gloaming at the far side of the cluttered room. No doubt there were children waiting for their dinner, a husband to be placated. A woman with a family of her own, with troubles of her own, could not be expected to attend to the sorrows of another indefinitely. The nun motioned to her: they would exchange places. When the woman was gone, Sister reached inside her cloak and took the small basket from under her arm. It was a flimsy thing, woven of unblessed palms, and much the worse for being crushed against her body for so long. She straightened and reshaped it a bit, catching as she did the green scent that the warmth of her flesh and the work of her hands could sometimes coax from the dried reeds. She placed it on the table beside the bed and untied the money pouch from her belt. It was all coins today, mostly pennies. She placed the pouch in the basket and then sat carefully on the side of the bed, her kidneys aching, her feet throbbing inside her shoes. She was sixty-four that year, and the stiffness in her back and her knees and the arthritis in her hands on these damp days had begun to limit her usefulness. More and more she was sent out with her basket to beg, rather than to nurse. She kept her dissatisfaction with the arrangement to herself, which meant that she complained only to God, who knew how she felt. Who had sent her here. She looked at the girl’s dark form, the length of her back and the curve of her young hip. Suddenly, the girl turned in the bed and threw herself into the Sister’s lap, weeping. Sister St. Savior put her hand to the girl’s dark hair. It was thick, and as soft as silk. She lifted the heavy knot of it and then brushed a strand from her cheek. This much the nun was certain of: the girl’s husband had cherished his wife with the beautiful hair. Love was not the problem. Money, more likely. Alcohol. Madness. The day and time itself: late afternoon in early February, was there a moment of the year better suited for despair? God Himself was helpless against it—Sister St. Savior believed this. She believed that God had held His head in His hands while the young man in the apartment above was slipping off this gray life—collar and yoke. God had wept, she believed this, even as she was getting off her chair in the lobby of Woolworth’s an hour before her usual time, even as she was climbing the stone steps, footsore and weary and needing a toilet, but going up anyway, although no one had sent for her. “What we must do,” she said at last, “is put one foot in front of the other.” It was her usual introductory phrase. “Have you had your dinner?” she said. The girl shook her head against the nun’s thigh. “Are there relations we can call for you?” Again she shook her head. “No one,” she whispered. “Just Jim and me.” Sister had the impulse to lift the girl’s shoulders a bit, to take the pressure of her weight off her own aching bladder, but resisted. She could endure it a little longer. “You’ll need a place to stay,” she said. “For tonight, anyway.” “No, still there.”Buy the print » Now the girl pulled away and raised her face to the dim light. She was neither as young nor as pretty as Sister had imagined. It was a plain, round face, swollen with tears. “Where will I bury him?” she asked. In her eyes, the nun saw the determination—not a result of the Sister’s admonition but, rather, what the woman herself was made of—to put one foot in front of the other. “We’ve got a plot in Calvary,” the girl said. “We got it when we were married. But the Church will never allow it now.” “Have you got the deed?” she asked, and the girl nodded. “Where?” “Upstairs,” she said. “In the sideboard.” Once, early in her novitiate, the nun had been sent to a squalid apartment filled with wretched children, where a skeletal woman, made old, discolored, barely human, by pain, was in the last throes of her disease. “There’s nothing to be done,” Sister Miriam had advised before they opened the door. And then, as they entered—there was the tremendous animal odor of decay, the woman’s hoarse moans, the famished children’s fraught silence—she added, “Do what you can.” “Your man fell asleep,” Sister St. Savior whispered now. “The flame went out. It was a wet and unfortunate day.” She paused to make sure the girl had heard. “He belongs in Calvary,” she said. “You paid for the plot, didn’t you?” The girl nodded slowly. “Well, that’s where he’ll go.” In her forty-seven years of living in this city, Sister had collected any number of acquaintances who could help surmount the many rules and regulations—Church rules and city rules and what Sister Miriam called the rules of polite society—that complicated the lives of women: Catholic women in particular, and poor women in general. Her own little Tammany, Sister Miriam called it. If it was all done quickly enough, Sister St. Savior knew she could get this woman’s husband buried in Calvary. “How long were you and Jim married?” the nun asked. She understood that there was some small resurrection in just speaking the man’s name. “Two years,” the girl said to the ceiling. And then she brushed her fingertips over her belly. “I’ve got a baby coming in summer.” Sister nodded. All right. God had His head out of His hands now, at least. He knew the future. There would be a baby to care for in the summer. And, for once, she would not foist the diapering and the spitting up onto one of the younger nuns. She nearly smiled. Out of the depths—the phrase came to her like a fresh scent on the air—comes the promise of a baby. A green scent coaxed out of dried reeds. The girl raised one hand from her stomach and clutched the crown of her hair. “He lost his job,” she said. “They let him go. The B.R.T. He was at odd ends.” The nun lifted Annie’s hand from her hair—it was a mad, dramatic gesture that would lead to mad, dramatic speech—and placed it once again on her middle, where her thoughts should be. “It might be best,” Sister said, “if you don’t move tonight. I’ll speak to the lady of the house. We’ll get something arranged.” In the parlor, they all turned to Sister St. Savior as if she had indeed been summoned to direct the proceedings. It was agreed that the lady of the house—Gertler was her name—would spend the night with her sister-in-law, across the street. Since the gas had been turned off, and would not be turned on again until tomorrow, most of the building’s occupants were clearing out for the evening. In the vestibule, neighbors were coming down the dark staircase with bedding and small satchels. Sister sent word with one of them to the owner of a boarding house nearby: the middle-aged neighbor would go there. The thin young man in the hat had already left, so she asked Officer O’Neil to knock on the door of one Dr. Hannigan. “Mention my name,” she said. “He’ll roll his eyes, but he’ll come.” It wasn’t until they’d all cleared out, and well before Dr. Hannigan arrived, that Sister allowed herself to use the toilet. Then she helped Annie undress and get comfortable in Mrs. Gertler’s bed. When Dr. Hannigan came, she held a candle over his shoulder while he examined the girl, put a stethoscope to her belly and her rising chest. As he was leaving, she asked him to go by the convent to tell them where she was—“So they don’t think I’ve been murdered.” And to, please, as well, go by the morgue to tell them that Sheen and Sons Funeral Home would be making the arrangements. She bent her head back to see him better, to make sure that her small black eyes were right on his own. There were some details, she added, that she’d ask him to keep to himself. Later, two of the sisters from the convent arrived with more blankets and two hot-water bottles wrapped in rags, and a dinner of biscuits and cheese and hot tea, which Sister St. Savior ate in the chair she had pulled up to the side of the bed. Then she dozed with her rosary in her gloved hands and dreamed, because of the cold, no doubt, and the familiar, icy ache of it in her toes, that she was on her stool in the vestibule of Woolworth’s. She startled awake twice because, in her dream, the woven basket, full of coins, was sliding off her lap. When the darkness had lifted a bit, she stood and walked into the parlor. The two sisters who had brought the supplies, Sister Lucy and a young novice whose name she couldn’t recall, were still there, side by side on the couch, asleep, puffed into their black cloaks like gulls on a pier. Slowly, Sister climbed first one flight, then the second, until she found the apartment that had burned. In the growing light, it was difficult to say what had ignited in the blast, though the smell of smoke and burned wool was strong. And then she saw on the floor a man’s overcoat and the sodden cushions of a high-backed couch, and the black traces of a large burn across the waterlogged rug. In the kitchen, there were the charred remains of a pair of muslin curtains and an arc of soot along the oven wall. She ran her finger through it, only to confirm that it would be easily removed. What would be difficult to remove, she knew, was the terrible odor. The smell of wet cinders, doused peat, damp stone, and swollen wood. Fire, shipwreck, the turned earth of graveyards. She went to the single window in the narrow kitchen. The courtyard below was full of shadow; looking down into it disheartened her in a way that she was unprepared for. She sat on the sill, lifted the twisted tea towel that had been left there. Outside, most of the facing windows were still dark, only a small light here and there: an early worker, a mother with an infant, a bedside vigil. Reluctantly, she cast her eyes down into the courtyard again. The sun would have to be well up in the sky to light that gloomy tangle, but, even at this hour, there was a variation in the shadows that caught her attention. It was the movement of birds, or of a stalking cat, or a patch of puddled rainwater briefly reflecting the coming dawn, but for just a moment she thought it was a man, crawling—“cowering” was the word—beneath the snarl of junk and dead leaves, the vague early light just catching the perspiration on his wide brow, the gleam of a tooth or an eye. She shivered, flexed her stiff fingers. She smoothed the towel on her lap and folded it neatly. She could tell herself that the illusion was purposeful: God showing her an image of the young man, the suicide, trapped in his bitter purgatory. But she refused the notion. It was superstition. It was the Devil himself who had drawn her eyes down, who had brushed her heart with despair. That was the truth of it. In the dining room, the sideboard was as big as a boat. She found the couple’s lease and marriage license before she put her hand on the narrow blue folder on which someone had written—it was a man’s severe script—“Deed for Calvary.” She slipped it into her pocket. In the bedroom, the windows were wide open, the shades rolled up; an ashen cord pull moved slowly in the dawn breeze. The bed was made, the blankets smoothed, no trace of fire in here, although there was more soot along the far wall. No trace, either, of where the husband might have lain on the bed. She knew immediately—it was the sympathy in his gestures, toward the girl on the bed, toward the apartment above—that it was the short police officer who had come back, after the body had been removed, to smooth and straighten the counterpane. One of us. Sister lifted the two pillows, slipped off their cases, then pulled off the sheets and the blankets, and said to God, “As You made us,” at the familiar sight of the rusty stains on the blue ticking of the mattress. She pushed the sheets into one of the pillowcases and wrapped a blanket around them. As she stepped away with the linens in her arms, she kicked something, and looked over her shoulder to see what it was. A man’s shoe, broad brown leather, well worn. There were two of them at the end of the bed. Gaping and forlorn, the black laces wildly trailing. She nudged them with her toe until they were safely hidden. She carried the pile of bedding down the narrow stairs. Sister Lucy was still sunk into herself, breathing deeply. Sister St. Savior dropped the linens on the couch beside her and, when that didn’t get her to stir, she touched the Sister’s black shoe with her own—and felt the keenness of the repeated motion, the man’s empty shoe upstairs and Sister Lucy’s here, still filled with its owner’s mortal foot. “I’d like you to sit with the lady,” she said. In the bedroom, the young nun—Sister Jeanne was her name—had her rosary in her hand and her eyes on the pile of blankets and coats under which the girl slept. Sister St. Savior signalled to her from the door, and she and Sister Lucy changed places. In the parlor, Sister St. Savior told Sister Jeanne that she was to take the bedclothes to the convent for washing and return with a bucket and broom. The two of them were going to scrub the apartment upstairs, roll up the wet rug, dry the floors, and repair what they could, to soften the blow of the woman’s return to the place where the accident had occurred, because return she would, with nowhere else to go and a baby on the way. Sister Jeanne’s eyes grew moist at this news. The tears suited her face, which was dewy with youth. Obediently, the young nun gathered the linens from the couch. Sister St. Savior went with her to the vestibule and then watched her walk delicately down the stone stairs, the bundle held to one side so that she could see her tiny feet as she descended. Sister Jeanne was small and slight, but there was a firmness about her, a buoyancy, perhaps, as she hurried away, the bundle in her arms, so much to do. She was of an age, Sister St. Savior understood, when tragedy was no less thrilling than romance. Sister St. Savior then headed down the steps herself. Sheen’s funeral parlor was only eight blocks over. By the time Sister Jeanne returned, the snow had become steady and the sidewalk was slick with it. She carried a broom and a bucket that contained both a scrub brush and breakfast: a jar of tea, bread, butter, and jam, all wrapped in a towel. As she reached the building, Sister Lucy was just coming down the steps, pulling her cloak around her hips and turning down the corners of her mouth as if the two motions were somehow connected—some necessary accommodation to what Sister Jeanne saw immediately was her ferocious anger. “St. Savior’s got the body coming back tonight,” Sister Lucy said, and added for emphasis, “This evening. For the wake. And buried first thing tomorrow morning.” She shook her jowls. She was a mannish, ugly woman, humorless, severe, but an excellent nurse. “Tomorrow!” Sister Lucy said again. “Calvary. She’s got it all arranged. And why is she rushing him into the ground?” She shivered a bit, then declared, “You can’t pull strings with God. You can’t pull the wool over God’s eyes.” A policeman and a fireman were conferring with another man in the hallway by the stairs. They all turned and nodded to Sister Jeanne as she came through the vestibule. The door to the parlor apartment was ajar, and she let herself in. She crossed the living room and entered the narrow corridor with its two portraits of dour peasants, and found Sister St. Savior in the tiny kitchen. Sister Jeanne placed the broom against the door and carried the bucket to the table where the old nun sat. The kitchen had been scrubbed; the only trace of Mrs. Gertler’s dinner was the newspaper that had been folded beside her plate. Sister St. Savior now had it wide open before her. Sister Jeanne poured the milky tea into a cup and set it on the table. “It’s still awfully cold in here, Sister,” she said. Sister St. Savior moved the cup closer without raising it. “The men have just been in to turn on the gas,” she said. “I asked them to carry out a few things that were damaged in the fire. They’re going to wash down the walls for me as well. So we’ve made some progress.” Sister Jeanne took a plate from the cupboard, set out the bread and the jam. “Mr. Sheen will get the body from the morgue this morning,” Sister St. Savior went on. “First thing when the lady wakes she’ll have to pick out his clothes. You can run them over for me. We’ve got a Mass set for six tomorrow morning. Then the cemetery. The ground, praise God, isn’t frozen. It’ll all be finished before the new day’s begun.” “That’s quick,” Sister Jeanne said. She hesitated and then added, “Sister Lucy wonders why it’s such a rush.” Sister St. Savior only raised her eyes to the top of the newspaper. “Sister Lucy,” she said casually, “has a big mouth.” She turned the opened newspaper over, to the front page, straightening the edges. “Here’s a story,” she said and put her fingertip to the page. “Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. A man over in Jersey, playing billiards in his home, accidentally opened the gas tap in the room, with the pole they use, the cue, it says, and asphyxiated himself.” She raised her chin. “His poor wife called him for dinner and found him gone. Day before yesterday. Mr. Sheen mentioned it to me this morning. He was pointing out how common these things are. These accidents with the gas.” Sister St. Savior moved her finger up the page. “And now here’s a story of a suicide,” she continued. “On the same page. Over on Wards Island. A man being treated at the hospital over there, for madness. It seems he was doing well enough, but then he threw himself into the water and disappeared. At Hell’s Gate. It says the water covered him up at Hell’s Gate.” She clucked her tongue. “As if the Devil needed to put a fine point on his work.” She moved her arm once again. She might have been signing a blessing over the page. “And here’s another story, about a Wall Street man gone insane. Same day. Throwing bottles into the street, bellowing. Carted off to the hospital.” She leaned forward, squinting toward her finger on the page. “ ‘Where he demanded to see J. P. Morgan and Colonel Roosevelt.’ ” Sister Jeanne cocked her head a bit, as if to read the page herself. “Is it true?” she asked. Sister St. Savior laughed. “True enough.” Her smile was as smooth as paint. “The Devil loves these short, dark days.” She went on, “Mr. Sheen said, as a matter of fact, that he could show the article about the billiard man to anyone in the Church, or at the cemetery, in case there was a question. To show how common these sorts of accidents were. And how easily they could be misinterpreted. This New Jersey man, after all, had come home early from work. And closed the door. Had he been a poor man, not a man with a billiard table at all, they might have made a different report out of it. The rich can get whatever they want put into the papers.” An hour later, when Mrs. Gertler returned to reclaim her apartment, Annie was up and dressed and sitting in a chair by the window with one of Sister Jeanne’s handkerchiefs clutched in both hands. The two nuns walked up the stairs with her, Sister Jeanne ahead and Sister St. Savior just behind. At four o’clock, the black hearse arrived and the coffin was carried up the stairs by Mr. Sheen and his assistants. The husband’s face was pale and waxen but it was, nevertheless, a lovely face. Boyish and solemn above the starched white collar, with a kind of youthful stubbornness about it as well. The look of a child, Sister St. Savior thought, confronting a spoon of castor oil. While Annie and Sister Jeanne knelt, Sister St. Savior blessed herself and considered the sin of her deception, slipping a suicide into hallowed ground. A man who had rejected his life, the love of this brokenhearted girl, the child coming to them in the summer. She said to God, who knew her thoughts, “Hold it against me if You will.” He could put this day on the side of the ledger where all her sins were listed: the hatred she felt for certain politicians, the money she sometimes stole from her own basket to give out as she pleased—to a girl with a raging case of the clap, to the bruised wife of a drunk, to the mother of the thumb-size infant, which she had wrapped in a clean handkerchief, baptized, and then buried in the convent garden. All the moments of how many days when her compassion failed, her patience failed, when her love for God’s people could not outrun the girlish alacrity of her scorn for their stupidity, their petty sins. She wanted the man buried in Calvary to give comfort to his poor wife, true. To get the girl what she’d paid for. But she also wanted to prove herself something more than a beggar, here at the end of her usefulness. She would get him buried in Calvary if only because the Church wanted him out, and she, who had spent her life in service to the Church, wanted him in. “Hold it against the good I’ve done,” she prayed. “We’ll sort it out when I see You.” Only a few neighbors came to call, every one of them a little restrained in sympathy, given the unspoken understanding that the son of a bitch could have taken them all with him. A trio of red-faced motormen from the B.R.T. stopped by, but they stayed only a minute, when no drink was offered. Later, the two nuns walked Mr. Sheen downstairs, in order to give the girl some time alone with her husband. On the street, he reached into the cab of the hearse and pulled out the day’s newspaper. He folded back a page and tapped a narrow article. Sister St. Savior leaned forward to read, Sister Jeanne at her elbow. In the descending light of the cold evening, the two could just make out the headline: “Suicide Endangers Others.” It was followed by a full report of the fire and the man’s death by his own hand. “There’s nothing to be done, Sister,” Mr. Sheen whispered. “Now that it’s in the paper, there’s not a Catholic cemetery that will have him.” Sister St. Savior pushed the undertaker’s hand away. She thought of the young man with the milk tooth and the gray fedora. “The New York Times,” she said, “has a big mouth.” The two nuns climbed the stairs again. Inside, they coaxed the sobbing girl up off her knees and into the bed. It was Sister Jeanne who took over then—no weariness in her narrow shoulders, no indication at all that she felt the tedium of too much sympathy for a stranger. With Annie settled, she told Sister St. Savior to go back to the convent to rest. She said she would keep vigil through the long night and have the lady ready first thing in the morning. Sister St. Savior left the two of them in the bedroom. At the casket, she paused again to look at the young man’s face. The stubbornness had drained away; it was only lifeless now. She went into the kitchen and glanced down into the purgatory of the back yard. At this hour, all movement was in the lighted windows above: a man at a table, a child with a bedside lamp, a young woman walking an infant to and fro. Of course, it was Sister Jeanne who would be here when the baby arrived, Sister Jeanne who had been sent for. She felt a beggar’s envy. She envied the young nun, true enough—a new sin for her side of the ledger. But she envied as well the coming dawn, still so many hours away. She envied the very day, when those who have despaired lie trapped in the featureless dark, while the young, the believing, bustle on, one foot in front of the other, so much to do. The baby, a daughter, was born in August. She was called Sally, but christened St. Savior in honor of the Sister’s kindness that sad afternoon. The damp and gray afternoon when the pilot went out. When her young father, a motorman for the B.R.T. whose grave she never found, sent her mother to do the shopping while he had himself a little nap.

What if you had a child? If you had a child, your life would be about more than getting through the various holiday rushes, and wondering exactly how insane Mrs. Witters in Accounts Payable is going to be on any given day. It’d be about procuring tiny shoes and pull toys and dental checkups; it’d be about paying into a college fund. The unextraordinary house to which you return nightly? It’d be someone’s future ur-house. It’d be the place that someone would remember, decades hence, as a seat of comfort and succor, its rooms rendered larger and grander, exalted, by memory. This sofa, those lamps, purchased in a hurry, deemed good enough for now (they seem to be here still, years later)—they’d be legendary to someone. Imagine reaching the point at which you want a child more than you can remember ever wanting anything else. Having a child is not, however, anything like ordering a pizza. Even less so if you’re a malformed, dwarfish man whose occupation, were you forced to name one, would be . . . What would you call yourself? A goblin? An imp? Adoption agencies are reluctant about doctors and lawyers if they’re single and over forty. So go ahead. Apply to adopt an infant as a two-hundred-year-old gnome. You are driven slightly insane—you try to talk yourself down; it works some nights better than others—by the fact that, for so much of the population, children simply . . . appear. Bing bang boom. A single act of love and, nine months later, this flowering, as mindless and senseless as a crocus bursting out of a bulb. It’s one thing to envy wealth and beauty and other gifts that seem to have been granted to others, but not to you, by obscure but undeniable givers. It’s another thing entirely to yearn for what’s so readily available to any drunk and barmaid who link up for three minutes in a dark corner of any dank and scrofulous pub. You listen carefully, then, when you hear the rumor. Some impoverished miller—a man whose business is going under (the small-mill owners, the ones who grind by hand, are vanishing; their flour and meal cost twice as much as the big-brand products, which are free of the gritty bits that can find their way into a sack of flour no matter how careful you are), a man who has no health insurance or investments or pension plan (he’s needed every cent just to keep the mill open)—that man has told the King that his daughter can spin straw into gold. The miller must have felt driven to it. He must have thought he needed a claim that outrageous to attract the attention of the King. You suppose (as an aspiring parent yourself, you prefer to think of other parents as un-deranged) he is hoping that if he can get his daughter into the palace, if he can figure out a way for her to meet the King, for the King to see the pale grace of the girl’s neck and her shy smile, and hear the sweet clarinet tone of her soft but surprisingly sonorous voice, the King will be so smitten (doesn’t every father believe his daughter to be irresistible?) that he’ll forget about the absurd straw-into-gold story. The miller is apparently unable to imagine all the pale-necked, shyly smiling girls the King has met already. Like most fathers, he finds it inconceivable that his daughter may not be singular; that she may be lovely and funny and smart but not so exceptionally so as to obliterate all the other contending girls. The miller, poor, foolish, doting father that he is, never expected his daughter to be locked into a room full of straw and commanded to spin it all into gold by morning, any more than most fathers expect their daughters to be unsought after by boys, or rejected by colleges, or abused by the men they eventually marry. Such notions rarely appear on the spectrum of paternal possibility. It gets worse. The King, who really hates being duped, announces, from the doorway of the cellar room filled with straw, that if the girl hasn’t spun it all into gold by morning he’ll have her executed. What? Wait a minute . . . . The miller starts to confess, to beg forgiveness. He was joking; no, he was sinfully proud. He wanted his daughter to meet the King. He was worried about her future. I mean, Your Majesty, you can’t be thinking of killing her. . . . The King gives the miller a glacial look, has a guard escort him away, and withdraws, locking the door behind him. Here’s where you come in. You’re descended from a long line of minor wizards. Your people have, for generations, been able to summon rain, exorcise poltergeists, find lost wedding rings. No one in the family, not in the past few centuries, at any rate, has thought of making a living at it. It’s not . . . respectable. It smells of desperation. And—as is the way with spells and conjurings—it’s not a hundred per cent reliable. It’s an art, not a science. Who wants to refund a farmer’s money as he stands destitute in his still parched fields? Who wants to say, “I’m sorry, it works most of the time,” to the elderly couple who still hear cackles of laughter coming from under their mattress, whose cutlery still jumps up from the dinner table and flies around the room? When you hear the story about the girl who can supposedly spin straw into gold (it’s the talk of the kingdom), you don’t immediately think, This might be a way for me to get a child. That would be too many steps down the line for most people, and you, though you have a potent heart and ferocity of intention, are not a particularly serious thinker. You work more from instinct. It’s instinct, then, that tells you, Help this girl and good may come of it. Maybe simply because you, and you alone, have something to offer her. You who’ve never before had much to offer any of the girls who passed by, leaving traces of perfume in their wake, a quickening of the air they so recently occupied. Spinning straw into gold is beyond your current capabilities, but not necessarily impossible to learn. There are ancient texts. There’s your Aunt Farfalee, who is older than some of the texts but still alive, as far as you know, and the only truly gifted member of your ragtag cohort, who are generally more prone to make rats speak in Flemish, or to summon beetles out of other people’s Christmas pies. Castles are easy to penetrate. Most people don’t know that; most people think of them as fortified, impregnable. Castles, however, have been remodelled and revised, over and over, by countless generations. There was the child-king who insisted on secret passageways, with peepholes that opened through the eyes of the ancestral portraits. There was the paranoid king who had escape tunnels dug, miles of them, opening out into woods, country lanes, and graveyards. So when you materialize in the chamber full of straw it has nothing to do with magic. The girl, though, is surprised and impressed. Already you’ve got credibility. And at first glance you see why the miller thought his gamble might work. She’s a true beauty, slightly unorthodox, in the way of most great beauties. Her skin is as smooth and poreless as pale-pink china, her nose ever so slightly longer than it should be, her brown-black eyes wide-set, sable-lashed, all but quivering with curiosity, with depths. She stares at you. She doesn’t speak. Her life, since this morning, has become so strange to her (she who yesterday was sewing grain sacks and sweeping stray corn kernels from the floor) that the sudden appearance of a twisted and stub-footed man, just under four feet tall, with a chin as long as a turnip, seems merely another in the new string of impossibilities. You tell her you’re there to help. She nods her thanks. You get to work. It doesn’t go well, at first. The straw, run through the spinning wheel, comes out simply as straw, shredded and bent. You refuse to panic, though. You repeat, silently, the spell taught to you by Aunt Farfalee (who is by now no bigger than a badger, with blank white eyes and fingers as thin and stiff as icicles). You concentrate—belief is crucial. One of the reasons that ordinary people are incapable of magic is a simple dearth of conviction. And, eventually . . . yes. The first few stalks are only touched with gold, like eroded relics, but the next are more gold than straw, and, soon enough, the wheel is spitting out strand upon strand of pure golden straw, not the hard yellow of some gold but a yellow suffused with pink, ever so slightly incandescent in the torch-lit room. You both—you and the girl—watch, enraptured, as the piles of straw dwindle and the golden strands skitter onto the limestone floor. It’s the closest you’ve come yet to love, to lovemaking—you at the spinning wheel and the girl behind you (she forgetfully puts her gentle hand on your shoulder), watching in shared astonishment as the straw is spun into gold. When it’s all finished, she says, “My lord.” You’re not sure whether she’s referring to you or to God. “Glad to be of service,” you answer. “I should go now.” “Let me give you something.” “No need.” But still she takes a strand of beads from her neck and holds them out to you. They’re garnets, cheap, probably dyed, though in this room, at this moment, with all that golden straw emanating its faint light, they’re as potently red-black as heart’s blood. She says, “My father gave me these for my eighteenth birthday.” She drapes the necklace over your head. An awkward moment occurs when the beads catch on your chin, but the girl lifts them off, and her fingertips brush against your face. The strand of beads falls onto your chest. Onto the declivity where, were you a normal man, your chest would be. “Thank you,” she says. You bow and depart. She sees you slipping away through the secret door, devoid of hinges or knob, one of many commissioned by the long-dead paranoid king. “That’s not magic,” she says, laughing. “No,” you answer. “But magic is sometimes all about knowing where the secret door is and how to open it.” With that, you’re gone. You hear about it the next day, as you walk along the outskirts of town, wearing the strand of garnets under your stained woollen shirt. The girl pulled it off. She spun the straw into gold. The King’s response? Do it again tonight, in a bigger room, with twice as much straw. He’s joking, right? He’s not joking. This, after all, is the King who passed the law about putting trousers on cats and dogs, who made laughing too loudly a punishable crime. According to rumor, he was abused by his father, the last King. But that’s the story people always tell, isn’t it, when they want to explain inexplicable behavior? You do it again that night. The spinning is effortless by now. As you spin, you perform little comic flourishes for the girl. You spin for a while one-handed. You spin with your back to the wheel. You spin with your eyes closed. She laughs and claps her hands. This time, when you’ve finished, she gives you a ring. It, too, is cheap—silver, with a speck of diamond sunk into it. She says, “This was my mother’s.” She slips it onto your pinkie. It fits, just barely. You stand for a moment staring at your hand, which is not by any standards a pretty sight, with its knobbed knuckles and thick, yellowed nails. But here it is, your hand, with her ring on one of its fingers. You slip away without speaking. You’re afraid that anything you say would be embarrassingly earnest. The next day . . .  Right. One last roomful of straw, twice the size again. The King insists on this third and final act of alchemy. He believes, it seems, that value resides in threes, which would explain the three garish and unnecessary towers he’s had plunked onto the castle walls, the three advisers to whom he never listens, the three annual parades in celebration of nothing in particular beyond the King himself. And . . . If the girl pulls it off one more time, the King has announced, he’ll marry her, make her his queen. That’s the reward? Marriage to a man who’d have had you decapitated if you failed to produce not just one but three miracles? Surely the girl will refuse. You go to the castle one more time and do it again. It should be routine by now, the sight of the golden straw piling up, the fiery gleam of it, but somehow repetition hasn’t rendered it commonplace. It is (or so you imagine) a little like being in love, like wondering anew, every morning, at the outwardly unremarkable fact that your lover is there, in bed beside you, about to open her eyes, and that your face will be the first thing she sees. When you’ve finished, she says, “I’m afraid I have nothing more to give you.” You pause. You’re shocked to realize that you want something more from her. You’ve told yourself, the past two nights, that the necklace and the ring are marvels, but extraneous acts of gratitude, that you’d have done what you did for nothing more than the sight of her thankful face. It’s surprising, then, that on this final night you don’t want to leave unrewarded. That you desire, with upsetting urgency, another token, a talisman, a further piece of evidence. Maybe it’s because you know you won’t see her again. You say, “You aren’t going to marry him, are you?” She looks down at the floor, which is littered with stray strands of gold. She says, “I’d be queen.” “But you’d be married to him, the man who was going to kill you if you didn’t produce the goods.” She lifts her head and looks at you. “My father could live in the palace with me.” “And yet. You can’t marry a monster.” “My father would live in the castle. The King’s physicians would attend to him. He’s ill—grain dust gets into your lungs.” You’re as surprised as she is when you hear yourself say, “Promise me your firstborn child, then.” She stares at you, dumbfounded, by way of an answer. You’ve said it, though. You may as well forge on. “Let me raise your first child,” you say. “I’ll be a good father. I’ll teach the child magic. I’ll teach the child generosity and forgiveness. The King isn’t going to do much along those lines, don’t you think?” “If I refuse,” she says, “will you expose me?” Oh. “I got that one for being a good boy.”Buy the print » You don’t want to descend to blackmail. You wish she hadn’t posed the question, and you have no idea how to answer. You’d never expose her. But you’re so sure of your ability to rescue the still unconceived child, who, without your help, will be abused by his father (don’t men who’ve been abused always do the same to their children?) and become another punishing and capricious king, who’ll demand meaningless parades and still gaudier towers and God knows what else. She interprets your silence as a yes. Yes, you’ll turn her in if she doesn’t promise the child to you. She says, “All right, then. I promise to give you my firstborn child.” You could take it back. You could tell her that you were kidding, that you’d never take a woman’s child. But you find—surprise—that you like this capitulation from her, this helpless compliance, from the most recent embodiment of all the girls over all the years who’ve given you nothing, not even a curious glance. Welcome to the darker side of love. You leave, again without speaking. This time, though, it’s not for fear of embarrassment. This time it’s because you’re greedy and ashamed; it’s because you want the child, you need the child, and yet you can’t bear to be yourself at this moment; you can’t stand there any longer enjoying your mastery over her. The royal wedding takes place. Suddenly this common girl, this miller’s daughter, is a celebrity; her face emblazons everything from banners to souvenir coffee mugs. And she looks like a queen. Her glowy pallor, her dark intelligent eyes, are every bit as royal-looking as they need to be. A year later, when the little boy is born, you go to the palace. You’ve thought of letting it pass—of course you have—but, after those months of sleepless musing over the life ahead, your return to the solitude and hopelessness in which you’ve lived for the past year (while people have tried to sell you key chains and medallions with the girl’s face on them, assuming, as well they might, that you’re just another customer, you, who wear the string of garnets under your shirt, the silver ring on your finger) . . . you can’t let it pass. Until those nights of spinning, no girl ever let you get close enough for you to realize that you’re possessed of wit and allure and compassion, that you’d be coveted, you’d be sought after, if you were just . . . Neither Aunt Farfalee nor the oldest and most revered of the texts has anything to say about transforming gnomes into straight-spined, striking men. Aunt Farfalee told you, in the low, rattling sigh that was once her voice, that magic has its limits, that the flesh has, over centuries, proved consistently vulnerable to afflictions but never, not even for the most potent of wizards, subject to improvement. You go to the palace. It’s not hard to get an audience with the King and Queen. One of the traditions, a custom so old and entrenched that even this King doesn’t dare abolish it, is the weekly Wednesday audience, at which any citizen who wishes to can appear in the throne room and register a complaint. You are not the first in line. You wait as a corpulent young woman reports that a coven of witches in her district is causing the goats to walk on their hind legs and saunter into her house as if they owned the place. You wait as an old man objects to the new tax being levied on every denizen who lives past the age of eighty, which is the King’s way of claiming for himself what would otherwise be passed along to his subjects’ heirs. As you stand in line, you see that the Queen has noticed you. She looks entirely natural on the throne, every bit as much as she does on banners and mugs and key chains. She has noticed you, but nothing has changed in her expression. She listens, with the customary feigned attention, to the woman whose goats are sitting down to dinner with the family, to the man who doesn’t want his fortune sucked away before he dies. It’s widely known that these audiences with the King and Queen never produce results of any kind. Still, people want to come and be heard. As you wait, you notice the girl’s father, the miller (the former miller), seated among the members of court, in a tricorne hat and an ermine collar. He regards the line of assembled supplicants with a dowager aunt’s indignity and an expression of sentimental piety—the recently bankrupt man who gambled with his daughter’s life and, thanks to you, won. When your turn arrives, you bow to Queen and King. The King nods his traditional, absent-minded acknowledgment. His head might have been carved from marble. His eyes are ice blue under the rim of his gem-encrusted crown. He might already be, in life, the stone likeness of himself that will top his sarcophagus. You say, “My Queen, I think you know what I’ve come for.” The King looks disapprovingly at his wife. His face bears no hint of a question. He skips over the possibility of innocence. He wonders only what, exactly, it is that she has done. The Queen nods. You can’t tell what’s going through her mind. Apparently, she has learned, during the past year, how to evince an expression of royal opacity, something she did not possess when you were spinning the straw into gold for her. She says, “Please reconsider.” You’re not about to reconsider. You might have considered reconsidering before you found yourself in the presence of these two, this tyrannical and ignorant monarch and the girl who agreed to marry him. You tell her that a promise was made. You leave it at that. She glances over at the King, and can’t conceal a moment of miller’s-daughter nervousness. She turns to you again. She says, “This is awkward, isn’t it?” You waver. You’re assaulted by conflicting emotions. You understand the position she’s in. You care for her. You’re in love with her. It’s probably the hopeless ferocity of your love that impels you to stand firm, to refuse her refusal—she who has, on the one hand, succeeded spectacularly and, on the other, consented to what must be, at best, a chilly and brutal marriage. You can’t simply relent and walk back out of the room. You can’t bring yourself to be so debased. She doesn’t care for you, after all. You’re someone who did her a favor once. She doesn’t even know your name. With that thought, you decide to offer a compromise. You tell her, in the general spirit of her husband’s fixation on threes, that she has three days to guess your name. If she can accomplish that, if she can guess your name within the next three days, the deal’s off. If she can’t . . . You do not, of course, say this aloud, but if she can’t you’ll raise the child in a forest glade. You’ll teach him the botanical names of the trees, and the secret names of the animals. You’ll instruct him in the arts of mercy and patience. And you’ll see, in the boy, certain of her aspects—the great dark pools of her eyes, maybe, or her slightly exaggerated, aristocratic nose. The Queen nods in agreement. The King scowls. He can’t, however, ask questions, not here, not with his subjects lined up before him. He can’t appear to be baffled, underinformed, misused. You bow again and, as straight-backed as your torqued spine will allow, you stride out of the throne room. You’ll never know what went on between Queen and King once they were alone together. You hope that she confessed everything and insisted that a vow, once made, cannot be broken. You even go so far as to imagine that she defended you for your offer of a possible reprieve. You suspect, though, that she still feels endangered, that she can’t be sure her husband will forgive her for allowing him to believe that she herself spun the straw into gold. Having produced a male heir, she has now, after all, rendered herself dispensable. And so, when confronted, she probably came up with . . . some tale of spells and curses, some fabrication in which you, a hobgoblin, are entirely to blame. You wish you could feel more purely angry about that possibility. You wish you didn’t sympathize, not even a little, with her in the predicament she’s created for herself. This, then, is love. This is the experience from which you’ve felt exiled for so long. This rage mixed with empathy, this simultaneous desire for admiration and victory. You wish you found it more unpleasant. Or, at any rate, you wish you found it as unpleasant as it actually is. The Queen sends messengers out all over the kingdom, in an attempt to track down your name. You know how futile that is. You live in a cottage carved into a tree, so deep in the woods that no hiker or wanderer has ever passed by. You have no friends, and your relatives live not only far away but in residences at least as obscure as your own (consider Aunt Farfalee’s tiny grotto, reachable only by swimming fifty feet under water). You’re not registered anywhere. You’ve never signed anything. You return to the castle the next day, and the next. The King scowls murderously (what story has he been told?) as the Queen runs through a gamut of guesses. Althalos? Borin? Cassius? Cedric? Destrain? Fendrel? Hadrian? Gavin? Gregory? Lief? Merek? Rowan? Rulf? Sadon? Tybalt? Xalvador? Zane? No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no and no. It’s looking good. But then, on the night of the second day, you make your fatal mistake. You’ll ask yourself, afterward, Why did I build a fire in front of the cottage tree and do that little song and dance? It seems harmless at the time, and you are so happy, so sure. You find yourself sitting alone in your parlor, thinking of where the cradle should go, wondering who’ll teach you how to fold a diaper, picturing the child’s face as he looks up at you and says, “Father.” It’s too much, just sitting inside like that, by yourself. It’s too little. You hurry out into the blackness of the forest night, amid the chirruping of the insects and the far-off hoots of the owls. You build a fire. You grant yourself a pint of ale, and then you grant yourself another. And, almost against your will, it seems that you’re dancing around the fire. It seems that you’ve made up a song: Tonight I brew, tomorrow I bake, And then the Queen’s child I will take. For little knows the royal dame . . . How likely is it that the youngest of the Queen’s messengers, the one most desperate for advancement, the one who’s been threatened with dismissal (he’s too fervent and dramatic in his delivery of messages, he bows too low, he’s getting on the King’s nerves) . . . how likely is it that that particular young hustler, knowing every inch of the civilized kingdom to have been scoured already, every door knocked on, will think to go out into the woods that night, wondering if he’s wasting precious time but hoping that maybe, just maybe, the little man lives off the grid? How likely is it that he’ll see your fire, creep through the bracken, and listen to the ditty you’re singing? You return, triumphant, to the castle on the third and final afternoon. You are for the first time in your life a figure of power, of threat. Finally, you cannot be ignored or dismissed. The Queen appears to be flustered. She says, “Well, then, this is my last chance.” You have the courtesy to refrain from answering. She says, “Is it Brom?” No. “Is it Leofrick?” No. “Is it Ulric?” No. Then there is a moment—a millimoment, the tiniest imaginable fraction of time—when the Queen thinks of giving her baby to you. You see it in her face. There’s a moment when she knows that she could rescue you as you once rescued her, when she imagines throwing it all away and going off with you and her child. She does not, could not, love you, but she remembers standing in the room on that first night, when the straw started turning to gold, when she understood that an impossible situation had been met with an impossible result, when she unthinkingly laid her hand on the sackcloth-covered gnarls of your shoulder, and she thinks (whoosh, by the time you’ve read whoosh, she’s no longer thinking it) that she could leave her heartless husband, she could live in the woods with you and the child. . . . Whoosh. The King shoots her an arctic glare. She looks at you, her dark eyes avid and level, her neck arched and her shoulders flung back. She speaks your name. It’s not possible. The King grins a conquering, predatory grin. The Queen turns away. The world, which was about to transform itself, changes back again. The world reveals itself to be nothing more than you, about to scuttle out of the throne room, hurry through town, and return to the empty little house that’s always there, that’s always been there, waiting for you. You stamp your right foot. You stamp it so hard, with such enchantment-compelled force, that it goes right through the marble floor, sinks to your ankle. You stamp your left foot. Same thing. You are standing now, trembling, insane with fury and disappointment, ankle-deep in the royal floor. The Queen keeps her face averted. The King emits a peal of laughter that sounds like defeat itself. And, with that, you split in half. It’s the strangest sensation imaginable. It’s as if some strip of invisible tape that’s been holding you together, from mid-forehead to crotch, had suddenly been stripped away. It’s no more painful than pulling off a bandage. And then you fall onto your knees, and you’re looking at yourself, twice, both of you pitched forward, blinking in astonishment at a self who is blinking in astonishment at you, who are blinking in astonishment at him, who is blinking in astonishment at you. . . . The Queen silently summons two of the guards, who pull you in two pieces from the floor in which you’ve become mired, who carry you, one half apiece, out of the room. They take you all the way back to your place in the woods and leave you there. There are two of you now. Neither is sufficient unto himself, but you learn, over time, to join your two halves together and hobble around. There are limits to what you can do, though you’re able to get from place to place. Each half, naturally, requires the coöperation of the other, and you find yourself getting snappish with yourself; you find yourself cursing yourself for your clumsiness, your overeagerness, your lack of consideration for your other half. You feel it doubly. Still, you go on. Still, you step in tandem, make your careful way up and down the stairs, admonishing, warning, each of you urging the other to slow down, or speed up, or wait a second. What else can you do? Each would be helpless without the other. Each would be stranded, laid flat, abandoned, bereft.

And I launched the flat-bottomed boat from a muddy part of the river I didn’t recognize. It seemed the bank of the river had moved much closer to the village, though I knew it hadn’t rained much that year. We took our places and, as Yongsu pulled the oars, I scanned the far shore for a good place to land—a landmark that Yongsu could aim for to counter the current. “Ya, I haven’t done this in a long time,” Yongsu said, flipping some water into the air. “You remember the last time you were out on this river?” That was five years ago. The water was so clear back then that it seemed only a few palm widths deep, shallow enough for me to reach down and touch the pebbles that rippled in the play of light and the shadow of the boat. Now, when I looked over the side, the water was a foggy green color, and after the first few feet I couldn’t see the bottom. “What happened to the water?” I said. “There’s something green in it.” “There’s no current since they put up the hydroelectric dam downstream.” Yongsu twitched his head in that direction. “They finished it two years ago. Ever since, the river’s been high all year and full of that algae. Fisheries all over the place now, raising carp, because they like that dirty bottom water.” “It even sounds different,” I said. I looked out across the flat expanse of the river-become-a-lake, recalling the last time I had been here—the gentle sound of the current, the clear water more transparent than air, flowing icy cold under the boat, and the pebbles, white and gray and black, slick and wet, so distant and yet so close, as the shadow of the boat slipped above them, rippling the bright-blue reflection of the sky. Even the air was clearer back then, without this invisible mist which seemed almost a mental pollution. How could they give up the old river for this murky green plane on which even the reflections looked stagnant? All the old channels must have been clogged with algae and the sort of scum that collects on a dead pond. You could smell the faint rot as the oars disturbed the surface. The creak and the rhythm made me think of voices—and I could almost hear them, nearly as loud as the gurgling sound of the oars dipping into the water—until Yongsu stopped rowing and we butted against the shore. “Crossing the River Jordan!” Yongsu sang out, parodying our Christian aunt’s favorite hymn. I must have looked alarmed when he brought me out of my reverie, and I worried that he had read the thoughts behind my expression, but he just broke into laughter. “We arrived!” he said. “Here we are in the other world.” We dragged the boat up a little ways, and I uncoiled the rope and tied it to a sapling. “Do you think we’ll be able to find Big Uncle?” I asked. “The air’s fresh,” Yongsu said. “From what Little Uncle said, we can just track him by the smell.” We had come up from Bupyeong on a lark. Yongsu had got into some trouble and needed to avoid his dropout friends. I’d recently moved back to Korea after two years away in America and Germany, where my father’s duty stations had taken him. I’d begun skipping school, and since I hadn’t missed any classes yet that week, I had decided to play hooky for a couple of days. Neither of us had been out in the country in a long time, so we had come to pay a visit to Little Uncle and Big Uncle, who liked us and wouldn’t mind keeping a secret. But when we’d arrived in Sambong-ni, the previous night, we’d learned that the gangrene in Big Uncle’s old foot injury had come back. This time the stench was so bad that the family had sent him across the river to the old cave. Little Uncle told us that we had to go and see him, because everyone was worried that Big Uncle might die this time. Yongsu started up the slope, and I followed, scanning back and forth through the underbrush. It didn’t take long for us to run into a small trail that followed the waterline, and we took that toward the west, into shadowy woods lanced by sunlight. Yongsu seemed oblivious of anything but the trail, but I relaxed my eyes the way Big Uncle had taught me when I was little, and it wasn’t long before I spotted something odd. “Look,” I said to Yongsu. There were rags draped over the lower branches of a tree to dry in the sun, and they were still discolored—yellow and red—with what must have been the pus and blood oozing from Big Uncle’s sores. “Yeah, he lives around here,” Yongsu said. “He can’t get far with that crippled foot, and he’s been sick for a while. Maybe he’s looking for food or some medicinal herbs.” I walked over to the rags and hesitated. “They’re dry. Should I gather them up?” “Quiet!” Yongsu said. “I hear footsteps. It’s someone limping.” Then I heard it. Someone crawling along the path, barely moving. It was still far away, but I could make it out—the sound of an injured man. “He must have fallen,” I said. “It sounds like he’s hurt.” Yongsu started up the trail, but I ran ahead of him, shouting “Big Uncle! Big Uncle!” until I thought I heard him reply. “Ya! ” Yongsu called after me. “Careful!” I heard his footfalls catching up to me as I ran along the trail through patches of light and shadow, feeling the texture of the ground change under me as I trod on pine needles, then pebbles, then dry earth. In a few moments, Yongsu was at my side, tugging at my shirt to make me stop, but I pulled away and continued to run in the direction of the sound. We came around a sharp bend in the trail and squinted into the sun that shone through a gap in the trees. A huge silhouette stood before us, massive and black to our sun-blind eyes. “Stop!” the shape said. We couldn’t stop. We tried to go back the way we had come, but then we heard a loud thump, and a quivering arrow shaft seemed to sprout out of a tree to block our way. The bright feathers trembled in the sunlight, and we heard a wild beating that might have been the wings of an escaping bird or the pounding of our hearts. As Yongsu and I froze and caught our breath, the dark silhouette shifted, looking momentarily like a giant black crane before bending into a more humble shape to approach us, grumbling under his breath. “It’s Yongsu,” he said, finally. “What reason do you have to be up here? And who’s that?” “Hello, Big Uncle,” Yongsu said. “I’ve come with Insu.” “Insu? Ya, you’ve grown like a bean sprout. All that good food in America.” “Hello, Big Uncle,” I said. “It’s been a long time, ungh? Pull that arrow out and follow me. Have you brought me anything to eat?” “No, sir,” Yongsu said as I struggled to pull the arrow out. “Aigo, you unmannered fools.” Big Uncle hobbled back up the trail, and Yongsu followed, leaving me with the arrow. The tip had punctured the bark of the tree and buried itself so far in the trunk that I had to grasp the arrow shaft with both hands—as close to the tip as possible for fear of breaking it—and move it gingerly back and forth until it dislodged. By the time I had it out, intact, Yongsu and Big Uncle were out of sight, and I had to run as quickly as I could to find them. “We used to call this place Skullhead Cave,” Big Uncle said, “because it looks like the top of a skull, and the two openings are like half-buried eye sockets. But now no one even knows what it’s called anymore. And why do you suppose I live in this cave?” He stared at us for a moment. “Don’t you think I’d live in a house if I could?” “Yes, Big Uncle.” “When I was young, we used to put the old people out in caves like this to die after they started to go senile. After they shit and pissed in their clothes and couldn’t remember the names of their children, the family would bring them into the mountains and seal them up in a cave with just a little opening for food. And every day they’d come and leave some food, until it stopped disappearing. When they knew the old person was dead, they’d wait a few more days, just to be sure, and then they’d open up the cave and take the body out for a good funeral and a good burial. Everyone would mourn, crying and sobbing as if the old person had died in some tragic way, but secretly they’d all be relieved. Buy the print » “What do you think of me saving them the trouble, ungh? They won’t even have to roll the rock back for me, since I’m living in my own cave shack. But maybe the animals will get in and eat my shrivelled corpse before they get me. Wouldn’t that be a shame?” We didn’t know what to say to Big Uncle. We had never heard him so bitter before, so crude and angry. “Now tell me why you came up here, ungh? You didn’t come up all by yourselves just to visit me, now, did you?” “No,” I said. “Well, we came up for another reason.” “Did Little Uncle send you to bring me back with you? Did you bring a jige?” “No, Big Uncle.” Because I felt so uncomfortable, I took the carton of cigarettes out of my jacket. I had brought them to give to him before we left, but I presented them to him now, holding them politely with both hands. “Here, Big Uncle. Please enjoy these.” “Ya,” he said. “I haven’t had one of these Camel cigarettes in years. Thanks.” He fumbled around, looking for matches, and then, giving up, simply pulled a thin stick out of the fire pit and blew on it until its tip glowed and burst into a tiny flame. He held the stick in his mouth as if it were a pipe stem while he unwrapped the carton, putting the cellophane under a U.S. Army cot he must have stolen from one of the nearby bases; then he ripped open a pack of the Camels, tapping a couple expertly out onto his palm. “You two smoke?” We shook our heads no, though we both did. “Ya, it feels like I’ll live awhile now,” Big Uncle said, slipping the extra cigarette back into the pack and then putting the pack into his vest pocket almost unconsciously. He lit the cigarette and took a deep first drag, savoring the smoke in his lungs before blowing it in a long plume at his gangrenous foot. “Helps cover the smell, ungh?” We didn’t know what to say, because any answer would have been wrong. If we said yes, we’d be admitting that we had smelled his rotting flesh before the cigarette smoke, and if we said no we’d be saying that the smell of smoke didn’t cover the odor of his foot, which he had wrapped in a makeshift bandage of dry moss, with only a few strands of straw to bind it together. “I expected you to come up here with an A-frame jige to carry me back down to the river. Now, that would have been an odd twist on the story, ungh?” He smiled, enjoying himself. “What story, sir?” I said. “Listen,” Big Uncle said. “You two go out into the woods and fetch me five of my arrows, and I’ll tell you the story. It’s going to take you a while, so I’ll have something good to eat waiting for you when you get back. Understood?” “Yes, Big Uncle,” we said. “What is it?” he said, reading our expressions. “Little Uncle told you not to fetch arrows for me?” We nodded dumbly. “Who do you listen to? Your Big Uncle or your Little Uncle? Who’s older? Does it look like I’ve lost my mind and become a child again?” “No, Big Uncle.” “Then go fetch the arrows, and bring up some water while you’re at it. Here’s the jug. And when you get back I’ll have some delicious mountain chicken for you.” He tossed a clay jar, wrapped in straw, to Yongsu, and shooed us off. We walked a little way down the trail before he called out, “Ya! Don’t look together. Go in different directions and look up at the lower branches of the trees. That’s where you’ll find the arrows. They should be easy to spot. I dyed the feathers red, yellow, and blue like the one I shot at you.” “Yes, Big Uncle!” we called back. When we were out of earshot, Yongsu smacked me on the shoulder and said, “Now what are we going to do, ungh?” “We have to find the arrows. What else can we do?” “Ah, fuck it! We shouldn’t have let him talk to us like that. I’m not staying out here in the woods to fetch some damned arrows for the old man.” He shoved the water jug into my belly and stalked off down the trail to the river. “You’re going?” I said. “That’s right.” “How will I get across the river if you take the boat?” “I’ll come back in the morning. You’re going to be out here all night looking for arrows in the trees, stupid.” I stopped there and watched Yongsu disappear as the trail descended sharply and veered to the right. In a few moments, I could no longer hear the heavy crunch of his footfalls, and the woods grew so quiet I thought I could make out the sound of blood rushing in my head. I searched for Big Uncle’s arrows until the light waned and I could no longer discern the colors in the shadows. I was terribly frustrated at first, impatient and even angry as I waded through patches of high grass, cutting my flesh, or picked my way through tangles of shrubbery because I thought I had glimpsed a yellow feather on the other side. At one point, the heat of the day seeping into my sweaty body, I rested under a tree, half dozing in its cool shade and the breeze that came across the flat green river. In a momentary lapse into real sleep, I had the briefest of dreams: I was sitting with my back against a tree, but it was nighttime, and it was raining so hard that not even the branches could protect me; water sluiced down on me each time the wind shifted, and I tried to huddle into myself, chilled like the blade of a knife that could cut me to the bone. I was going to die, and the fear and the cold woke me up into the slightly thick and groggy heat of late afternoon. It must have been the heat, I thought. I dreamed of the opposite thing even though in my dream I’d been doing the same thing—looking for Big Uncle’s arrows. I resumed my search and, while the light held, I happened on a place where Big Uncle’s aim must have been especially bad. I found four arrows. “My, you’ve gotten yourself quite dirty,” Big Uncle said when I returned to his camp with the arrows and the water jug. He had a small fire going, and he had skewered a couple of small birds, which were slowly browning above the flames. I was glad I had been upwind all day, because the moment I smelled the cooking my stomach clenched with hunger and my mouth filled with saliva. Big Uncle took the arrows with a nod. He didn’t bother asking about Yongsu, so I didn’t mention him, either. “I did my best,” I said. “I’m sorry I only found four arrows.” “An inauspicious number,” Big Uncle said. “Sa. The death number. The snake number. You know, ungh?” I nodded. “It was getting dark under the trees.” “Well, since you plucked that other arrow this morning, let’s say you found five. Now, five is an interesting number. O. It sounds like the sign of the horse, or a mistake, or a word for anguish. O-da. You have come. O-do. You have awakened.” He ran each arrow through his fingers, checking to see if their shafts had split, if their feathers had come undone. “So what do you think, Insu-ya?” “I don’t know,” I said. I had no idea what he meant by the numbers and their sounds in Korean. All I knew was that Koreans were as superstitious about the number four as Americans were about thirteen. Buildings didn’t have a fourth floor, and most Korean locker rooms had sequences that jumped from three to five, thirteen to fifteen, and thirty-nine to fifty. “Let’s eat. I’m as hungry as you are. Here.” Big Uncle unfolded a small square of paper full of sea salt and poured some onto my palm. “No spice, so this will have to do.” I sat at the edge of the fire and took the spitted bird from Big Uncle. I realized that he had cooked only two birds, and I looked from mine to his. “What’s the matter? I gave you the small one?” “No, sir. I was just wondering—” “If both of you had come back? Well, then, I suppose you’d be fighting over the one, ungh?” He laughed and tore a piece of meat from the breast of his to dab in the salt. I ate, too, and despite my queasiness at the clump of black crow feathers I saw in the underbrush, the meat tasted wonderful, its gamy tang cut by the salt. My face warmed by the fire, and my stomach rumbling even as I ate, I tore my bird to shreds and sucked at the bones until they were dry. It was dark when we were done, and we passed the jug of water back and forth to wash down the last scraps of crow meat. “The nights are long if you’re the thoughtful sort,” Big Uncle said. “So tell me what you’re thinking about.” “I was wondering about your foot,” I said. “The smell bother you?” “No, sir. I can’t smell it now. I found your wrappings this morning.” “You know I hate when you check your messages at the table.”Buy the print » “Well, it’s a story. Like some folktale. But everyone’s life is like a story, isn’t it? From a long, long time ago.” I expected Big Uncle to smoke while he talked, but he just closed his eyes, as if to let the firelight warm his eyelids. He sat with his legs crossed, his bad foot on top, and he told the story into the fire. “I was coming home after some celebration—the hundred-day party for Old Pak’s grandson. It was past sunset, and they told me to stay the night there in that village, but I stubbornly decided to come home over the mountain. There were still wild animals in the woods back then and even rumors of tigers, though no one had seen one since the Japanese came. That’s why people said not to go—because of the tigers—but they were actually afraid of ghosts and goblins and the usual lies. “It was easy to walk. The moon was out. It wasn’t full, but there was enough light to see the trail where it was good. I was feeling fine, because I’d had a good time at the celebration. I wasn’t thinking of ghosts at all when I first saw the light. It was a little light in the distance. That’s what it looked like—a lamp in the woods or a candle in the window of someone’s house, something small and bright only because it was so dark. “I thought someone was out there, so I called out to him. ‘Yeoboseyo! Who’s out there? Is anyone out there?’ No answer. Then I thought maybe it was someone who had got injured, so I started into the woods to find him. “I shouldn’t have left the trail. That was a mistake. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of the woods, and the light, which had been right in front of me, suddenly blinked out, and I was in the pitch-black night. I couldn’t see anything. I was reaching out around myself so the tree branches wouldn’t scratch out my eyes. “Then the light blinked on again somewhere to my right. Then off again, and it reappeared somewhere to my left. And that’s when I knew it was a goblin light or a ghost. I started thinking of all those terrible stories about the woodcutters who see the lights at night and then get enticed by fox demons and have their life energy sucked out. I started running back toward the trail, or where I thought it should be, but the light kept appearing in front of me, and then I would change directions and run headlong into a tree or fall into a hole. “I must have run around like that for hours. I was a mess. All scratched up, my ankle twisted, my clothes torn like floor rags. Bruises all over my forearms and shins. But I kept running, because I could feel it. It was some female spirit, and it was determined to get me. I had heard stories about the ghosts of dead virgins and how they hunted unwary men at night. That’s what I was afraid of. “I ran and ran, until finally I just didn’t have the strength anymore, and I collapsed against a tree. The light came at me then. It grew brighter and brighter until it was a brilliant blue, and then a blinding white, and I lost consciousness. “When I woke up, it was past dawn. The sun was above the horizon, and a streak of light was shining on my face. I sat there for the longest time, because I thought the ghost had tied me up to that tree, but then, when I finally had the strength and the courage to look around, I saw that I was sitting against the tree as if I were tied to it, but there were only a few dried-up strands of grass around me. Not even enough to weave into a bad straw rope. “And there were two little scars on my foot. It didn’t look much worse than a couple of mosquito bites or maybe a couple of pimples, but that’s what festered later and spread up and down my foot. Even with the best Chinese medicine, it never really healed. Everyone says it was a snakebite, but that’s not true. “It wasn’t until years later that I remembered what happened to me after I was blinded by that light. And it was in a dream. I remembered it in a dream. A beautiful woman came out of that light. She was dressed in a white costume in the Chinese style. The fabric was like the finest silk, so white it was like silver. She had long black hair and very big eyes—round eyes, almost Western. She told me to come with her, and I understood her though she didn’t seem to speak. I went into that light, and then I found myself on a high Chinese-style bed with no bed mat under me. The woman’s servants were standing around me, looking down at me. There were shiny silver ornaments and decorations everywhere. Beautiful things that looked like jewelry and weapons and eating utensils. The lamp they shined down on me was brighter than the sun. White light was floating everywhere like flour dust, and the beautiful woman climbed up on the bed, on top of me, and, right in front of her servants, she took off her clothes and pushed herself down onto me. I thought my penis would burst, but she was slightly cold, not like a Korean woman. It was almost impossible to feel anything with all those servants watching me, but somehow I managed to squirt my seed into her, and then everything grew dark again. “Now, why do you suppose this was? Why would I remember this part of the night years and years later? That woman was like a Heavenly Maiden, but I know she was the ghost of a virgin who had died a very long time ago. Probably when the Chinese or the Mongols were in our country. She must have been a princess, with all that jewelry and those servants. She must have been waiting for centuries for some man to come along and release her into the next world with the power of his yang. “Sometimes, when I get a little drunk, I can remember even more about how beautiful everything was, but then, when I’m sober again, I forget. But it was beautiful. She was the most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, and coupling with her was wonderful. I think I can remember, sometimes, that we rutted like animals without all those servants around. “And that’s why I don’t ever regret having this wound on my foot. It was the price I had to pay for my enjoyment, and I will have to keep paying it until I go into the next world. But when I coupled with that ghost woman my penis was like a gidung, and my seed gushed like a waterfall. “Now, Little Uncle didn’t tell you that part of the story, did he?” “No, Big Uncle.” “Throw some more wood onto the fire and light me a twig for a cigarette.” I added the wood and handed him a long splinter, burning at the end like a match, and he lit one of the Camels I had given him. He seemed ready to withdraw; I could see him sitting there, gazing into the fire and thinking his thoughts as if I were not even there, breathing deeply through his nose, exhaling long plumes of smoke, black eyes glinting in the red-and-yellow firelight. Had I not been there, perhaps he would have spoken to himself or sat in some kind of trance, talking with his spirits and his dreams. Had I not been there, he might have sung himself to sleep with the songs from his childhood, the ones his mother and his aunts sang for him on warm summer nights. Had I not been there, he might have wept with sadness or shouted out his anger at the family that had driven him across the river to live like a Taoist hermit, and in the momentary quiet of his cigarette smoking I wished I weren’t there in body but looking down on Big Uncle instead, watching over him from above, the way his tutelary spirit might from the other world. “Say what’s on your mind now,” Big Uncle said. “At times like this, you should let the thoughts leap off your tongue. You don’t want to be regretful.” “I was thinking about your bow, Big Uncle.” “What about my bow?” “Where did you get it? Where did you learn how to shoot it?” “Our ancestors were fierce archers,” Big Uncle said. “I don’t know where we learned it. From the Mongols, probably. In the old days, there were men in the Lee clan who galloped on horseback and shot arrows so straight they could hit the hole in a dangling coin.” “It reminds me of a book I read about an outlaw named Robin Hood,” I said. “He lived in a secret camp in the woods, and his bow was as tall as a man.” “How did he get a bow that big?” Big Uncle asked. “It must be a fantasy.” “It was a wooden bow, Big Uncle. They called them longbows, and they could shoot arrows that could pierce armor.” “And how did they use them on horseback?” “There are also sandwiches hidden in there, to help you make some new friends.”Buy the print » “They didn’t ride.” “Ah.” He moved the half-smoked Camel to the other side of his mouth. “Robin Hood robbed the rich people and gave the money to the peasants. When he knew he was about to die, he shot an arrow out of his window and told his most loyal follower to bury him where it fell.” “Now, that’s a good story,” Big Uncle said after a moment. “This Ro Bing Ho sounds like a good man. Did he come from a family of warriors or farmers?” “I don’t know,” I said. “His father was an official in some district, I think, but he was wrongly deposed by an evil adviser to the king. When his father died, Robin Hood had to hide in the forest with a band of outlaws.” “Like our Hong Gil-dong, ungh?” “Yes, sir.” Big Uncle tossed another piece of wood onto the fire and yawned. He put out the Camel by rolling its shaft against a piece of wood so that only the ash and the burning tip fell off, and then he wet a thumb and forefinger with his saliva and doused the remaining fibres of tobacco before placing the butt behind his right ear. Beyond the flickering boundary of light, the night sounds suddenly grew louder, until Big Uncle cleared his throat and spat his phlegm into the flames, where it made a sizzling noise. “Ro Bing Ho,” he said again—I didn’t bother to correct him. “Good.” “What’s good, Big Uncle?” “Better than some charlatan doctor of wind and water,” he said. “Any fool can take a fancy compass and mumble phrases from the Book of Changes. But that Ro Bing Ho had the right idea.” He rose stiffly to his feet, then picked up his bow and one of his precious arrows. I knew what he was about to do, and the thought thrilled me for some reason, though I immediately sensed its terrible consequence. Big Uncle stretched and limbered up his neck, and then he drew the bow, bending the ox horn nearly back on itself against the nocked arrow. He looked directly up into the night, and I followed his gaze to see a circle of blackness ringed by the illuminated bottoms of the tree branches, leaves quietly rustling in the wind and the force of heat from the campfire. How odd, I thought, as I looked up at a domed wall of foliage with a hole in the center. This was what it was like to bend back your neck and stare up at the ceiling of a basilica to see the holy murals of Christ and God and the angels, but out here in the forest that center was lost in a blackness that was not even punctuated by a star, because the light of the campfire had made us night-blind. Now Big Uncle turned four times, once in each direction, and though I thought it impossible to know the cardinal directions at night without the stars as a guide, I sensed that Big Uncle knew the points of the compass exactly. “Insu-ya,” he said. “Yes, Big Uncle.” “Bury me where this arrow falls.” And he let the arrow fly with a loud whoosh of air torn by string and wood, and the arrow blurred high up into the blackness. If Big Uncle had told me then that he had hit the eye of the moon, I would have believed him. The arrow was gone. He lowered the bow to look at me, his eyes flashing with cold flame brighter than the fire. “Swear to me,” he said. “When I’m dead, you’ll find the arrow, and you’ll have them bury me where it lands.” “Yes, sir.” “Do you swear?” “Yes, Big Uncle, I swear.” I was suddenly afraid, but then he gave me a wide smile and sat down again in a single motion, tired and old. I was terribly stiff myself in the morning, waking just before dawn. Big Uncle had kept the fire burning low to keep us warm; he had dug himself a small hip hole and curled around the periphery of the stones, letting me use his green U.S. Army blanket on the cot. Even so, I was cold, with an ache that didn’t go away until I had struggled to my feet and stretched a few times to get my blood moving. All night long, I had awakened at intervals when the wind shifted and carried the stench of Big Uncle’s foot in my direction. Even the strong smell of the smoky wood, which Big Uncle must have picked just for my sake, couldn’t mask the odor of decay, and in the morning dampness it bore a subtle touch of sewage mixed with the rot. As I tightened my abdominal muscles and pressed my palms together to get my blood flowing, I noticed a small sooty teapot quietly steaming over the fire. “Let’s have some cha before you go,” Big Uncle said without looking at me. “I would offer you coffee, which is what Yankees do, I suppose, but I’m fresh out.” “Did you sleep well, Big Uncle?” “Yes, I slept. I’m half asleep all the time, so the night doesn’t make much difference. Any dreams?” “I don’t remember.” “You should always remember your dreams, Insu-ya. Dreams are your real life. It’s a shame if you don’t remember it.” Big Uncle turned to face me, wide awake. His face had none of the puffiness of someone who had been asleep; it was drawn tight, the wrinkles fine and shallow until he smiled. He lifted the teapot off the arched stick that kept it well above the fire, and he poured me an old C-ration can full of Japanese green tea swimming with leaf scraps. “The Japs are awful, but they make a fine tea, ungh?” It was bitter and soothing, and the steam warmed my face. I sipped a little at a time, holding the can between my palms when it had cooled enough not to burn me. “Why do you say dreams are our real life?” Big Uncle made a sweeping gesture around us. “This is all a dream,” he said. “When you die and move on, you forget it just like you forget dreams. And yet this is where you should have learned all your karmic lessons. What a shame to forget.” “I don’t know much about those Taoist things,” I said. “We all know.” Big Uncle lit a cigarette and sucked on it with the same motion he used to sip his can of tea. “Now go, because you’re going to be hungry, and I have nothing to feed you. When you come back to see me again, bring me some coffee and something good to eat.” “Yes, Big Uncle.” “Yongsu won’t be there with the boat. You’re going to have to swim across. Can you do that?” “Yes, sir.” “Good. Now go.” Big Uncle motioned as if to dust me away, and I walked slowly down the trail, trying to remember what he had told me. I leapt into the warm water just behind a little raft I had made for my clothes, and, still submerged, slowly rising from the depths of my plunge, I opened my eyes and found myself suspended in the very center of a frightening sphere of green nothingness. Below me the greenness grew darker and darker, by imperceptible degrees, into a murky blackness, and above me it grew suddenly lighter into the rippling clarity of the surface. But all around, receding into a darkness that was never quite black, an indeterminate green fog; in every direction, the unknown; things lurking just beyond the threshold of vision, where sense became imagination. There was nothing in that river that could harm me, but that instant of perception so terrified me that I would never again swim in open water without believing that something waited, just beyond the range of my vision, to drag me down until the light above me turned as dark as the green-black nothingness below. My nose was beginning to fill, and the pressure in my head told me that I should kick up. For some reason, I felt I had been there before—right there—or would be again. Suddenly I wanted to look around to see if I could see myself looking at me, but the feeling that gave me was so strange that I shook my head, releasing bubbles that showed me which way was up. I slowly raised my sluggish arms, moving them up against the unexpectedly fierce resistance of the water, and then arced them back down again as I gave a violent scissor kick. Green light. Green shadow. Intermediate greens in infinite gradations, subtle and distinct, as numerous as all the names of God. Upward, at the surface, a dark, irregular silhouette with a sharp tail protruding, like the tail of an angular manta ray—it was my raft of clothes, and as I raced my own rising bubbles toward it I thought I glimpsed, just for a second, out of the corner of my eye, a giant green carp beneath me, flicking its broad tail in the very periphery of my vision.

Ann Gallagher was listening to the wireless, cutting out a boxy short jacket with three-quarter-length sleeves, in a pale-lilac wool flecked with navy. She had cut the pattern from her own design—there was a matching knee-length pencil skirt—then pinned the paper shapes onto the length of cloth, arranging and rearranging them like pieces of a puzzle to make them fit with minimum waste. Now her scissors bit in with finality, growling against the wood surface of the table, the cloth falling cleanly away from the blades. These scissors were sacrosanct and deadly, never to be used on anything that might blunt them. Ann and her friend Kit Seaton were renting the back basement of a big house in a residential area of Bristol for their dressmaking business; because the house was built on a hill, their rooms opened onto a garden, and sunlight fell through the French windows in shifting patches onto Ann’s cutting table. Someone came down the steps to the side entrance, then tapped on the opaque glass panes of the door; Ann looked up, irritated at being interrupted. Kit said that they should always switch over to the Third Programme when clients came—it was more sophisticated—but there wasn’t time, and Ann could make out enough through the bubbled glass to know that the woman standing on the other side wasn’t sophisticated anyway. She was too bulky, planted there too stolidly, with an unassuming patience. Some clients pushed their faces up against the door and rattled the handle if they were kept waiting for even a moment. “Ann? Do you remember me? It’s Nola.” Nola Higgins stood with military straightness, shoulders squared; she was buttoned up into some sort of navy-blue uniform, unflatteringly tight over her heavy bust. “I know I shouldn’t have turned up without an appointment,” she apologized cheerfully. “But do you mind if I ask a quick question?” Ann and Nola had grown up on the same street in Fishponds and had both won bursary places at the same girls’ grammar school. Nola was already in her third year when Ann started, but Ann had ignored her overtures of friendship and avoided sitting next to her on the bus that took them home. She’d hoped that Nola understood about her need to make new friends and leave Fishponds behind. Nola had trained to be a district nurse when she left school, and Ann didn’t often cross paths with her; now she guessed, with a sinking heart, that Nola had come to ask her to make her wedding dress. There had been other girls from her Fishponds past who’d wanted her to do this—it wasn’t even, strictly speaking, her past, because for the moment she was still living there, at home with her family. She and Kit needed the work, but Kit said that if they were seen to be sewing for just anyone they’d never get off the ground with the right people. Perhaps when Nola knew their prices she’d be put off. Hesitating, Ann looked at her wristwatch. “Look, why don’t you come on in for ten minutes. I am busy, but I’ll take a break. I’ll put some coffee on to perk.” She showed Nola into the fitting room. They had a sewing room and a fitting room and a little windowless kitchenette and a lavatory; a dentist on the ground floor used the front basement rooms for storage, and they sometimes heard his heavy footsteps on the stairs. The Third Programme helped drown out the sound of his drill when clients came for fittings. Ann and Kit had made gold velvet curtains for the fitting-room windows and covered a chaise longue in matching velvet; on the white walls there were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass. Kit sometimes brought her boyfriends to this room at night, and Ann had to be on the lookout for the telltale signs—dirty ashtrays, wineglasses, crumpled cushions. She was convinced that Kit had actually been making love once on top of someone’s evening dress, laid out on the chaise longue after a fitting. Ann wondered whether Nola Higgins was impressed by the glamorous new style of her life or simply accepted it, as calmly as she’d have accepted any place she walked into. She must have seen some things during the course of her work as a nurse, some of them horrors. Nola’s home perm made her look closer to their mothers’ age; the dark curls were too tight and flat against her head, and when she sat down she tugged her skirt over her knees, as if she were self-conscious about her broad hips. But her brown eyes were very alert and steady, and she had the kind of skin that was so soft it looked almost loose on her bones, matte pink, as if she were wearing powder, though she wasn’t. Ann put on the percolator in the kitchenette. Kit had grown up in France, or claimed she had, and insisted that they always make real coffee. They served it in little turquoise coffee cups, with bitter-almond biscuits, on a Japanese lacquer tray that Ann had found in a junk shop. Sometimes the coffee was so strong the clients could hardly swallow it. “I won’t keep you long,” Nola said. “But I have a favor to ask.” She didn’t have the same broad Bristol accent as her parents—Ann’s mother would have said that she was nicely spoken. It was about a wedding dress, of course. The wedding would be in June, Nola said. It would be a quiet one, at least she hoped so. She knew that this was short notice and probably Ann was all booked up, but they had decided in a hurry. “Not that kind of hurry,” she added, laughing without embarrassment. “I suppose you sometimes have to let out the waists as the brides get bigger.” Ann was accomplished at congratulating other women on their engagements. She hardly felt a pang—felt instead something sprightly and audacious, more like relief. “Do you know about our prices?” she said tactfully. “I could show you a price list.” “Oh, that won’t be a problem,” Nola began to say. “Because the man I’m marrying, my fiancé . . .” And then she had to break off, because her eyes brimmed with tears and a red heat came into her cheeks; Ann had an intuition that the flush ran thrillingly all over her body. Who’d have thought that Nola Higgins would be susceptible to that kind of thrill? She was bending over her handbag, fishing for a handkerchief. “How silly,” she said. “It’s ridiculous, Ann. But I’m just so happy. I can’t quite believe that I’m saying those words, that we’re really going to be married. He’s such a lovely chap. And he’ll be able to pay your prices. I knew you wouldn’t be cheap.” “Well, aren’t you the lucky one,” Ann said admiringly. “A lovely chap, and he can pay as well!” “I am lucky! Don’t I know it. I was his nurse, you know, when he was very poorly. That’s how we met. But it’s not how it sounds: that isn’t what he wants me for, just to look after him. I mean, to see him now you couldn’t tell he was ever ill, except he has a little limp, that’s all.” “I’m happy for you,” Ann said. Nola sat very still, holding her coffee cup in both hands, smiling almost dazedly, accepting the tribute. She had brought some fabric with her in a paper bag—the brides often did, and Ann usually had to talk them out of it. Her fiancé had a lot of material in his home, Nola said, put away in trunks and cupboards. And there were some lovely old clothes, too; Ann should come out and see sometime. Ann made a politely interested noise, wondering if he kept a secondhand shop; she was imagining someone much older than Nola, respectable and considerate, quiet, perhaps a widower. The material in the bag smelled of mothballs, but it looked expensive—thick silk brocade, off-white, embroidered with cream flowers. “It’s old,” Nola said, “but it’s never been used. And there’s some lace, too, good lace. I didn’t bring that—I wanted to ask you first.” She fingered the brocade uneasily, staring down at it. “It’s too much, isn’t it? I’ll look like a dog’s dinner, that’s what I said. I just want to wear something sensible, look like myself. But he insisted, said I had to bring it.” Ann really was convinced that if you could only find the right clothes you could become whatever you wanted, you could transform yourself. She let the heavy fabric fall out of its folds and made Nola stand up, then held it against her in front of the cheval mirror, pulling it in around her waist, frowning expertly at Nola’s reflection across her shoulder, tugging and smoothing the cloth as if she were molding something. “You see? The off-white is very flattering against your dark hair and your lovely skin. There isn’t enough for a whole dress if you want full length, but I think we could get a fitted bodice and a little peplum out of it and find a matching plain fabric for the skirt. With your full figure you want to go for a nice clean silhouette, nothing fussy. This could look stunning, actually.” “Do you think so?” Nola’s eyes, doubting and trusting, looked out from the reflection into hers. Kit came slamming through the glass door after lunch, in the middle of telling some crazy story, screaming with laughter, half cut already, with a couple of men friends in tow. Ann was just starting on the lining for the lilac suit. One of the friends was a medic, Ray, Kit’s current boyfriend, or he thought he was—Ann knew about other things, one married man in particular. The second friend was also a medic. Ann hadn’t seen him before: Donny Ross, who played the piano, apparently, in a jazz band. Donny Ross had a body as thin as a whip and cavernous cheeks and thick jet-black hair with a long quiff that flopped into his eyes. His mouth was small and his grin was surprisingly girlish, showing his small teeth, though he didn’t grin much—or say much. He was mostly saturnine and judgmental. It was obvious to Ann right away that Donny didn’t like Kit. He saw through her bossy know-how and the whole parade of her snobbery: going on about how Proust was her favorite author and her mother used to have her hats made on the Champs-Élysées and weren’t the little bureaucrats who wanted our taxes so ghastly—as if she couldn’t guess what Ann had guessed already, that Donny was a socialist. He got up while Kit was still talking and went into the kitchenette, banging through the cupboards, looking for something he didn’t find—alcohol, probably; he came out with the bag of sugar and a cup of the coffee that Ann had made for Nola earlier, which must have been quite cold. Then he sat spooning sugar out of the bag into his cup, no saucer, spilling it all over the table, six or seven spoonfuls just to make the coffee bearable, and Kit didn’t say a word about the sugar bag, though she was so particular about everything being served up in the right way. Perhaps Donny Ross frightened her, Ann thought. She told Kit about Nola’s wedding then; best to get it over with while she was in this mood, and there was company. “I know it’s not exactly our style,” she said. “But we could do with the work.” She gave Kit the piece of paper where Nola had written down the details, and expected her to make her usual disdainful face when she read through it, as if something smelled funny. Kit had a long, horsey face, tousled honey-colored hair, and a stubby, sexy, decisive little body, like an overdeveloped child’s; she expressed all her tastes and distastes as if they afflicted her physically, through her senses. To Ann’s surprise, she sat up excitedly. “Oh, Lawd, this is a marvel. I can’t believe you don’t know where this wedding is, you angel-innocent. It’s the most perfect little bijou Queen Anne house, tucked away in its own deer park on the way to Bath. Look what you’ve done, you clever daft thing! The pictures will be in all the good papers.” “But Nola Higgins is from Fishponds. We were at school together.” “I don’t care who she is. She’s marrying a Perney, and they’ve owned Thwaite Park for centuries.” Then Ann began to understand why Nola thought she was so lucky. She explained it all to Kit, and showed her the old brocade that Nola had left. “She said he had lots more fabric in his house. And old clothes, too—she thought I might like to see them. And I turned her down! I thought he must be running some kind of secondhand shop!” “Which, in a funny way, you could say he was,” Donny Ross said. Kit flopped back onto the chaise longue in exaggerated despair, limbs flung out like a doll’s. “When she comes back, you’re to tell her you’ve changed your mind. I’d die for an invitation to go out there and poke around. Imagine what they’ve got in their attic!” “Skeletons,” Donny Ross said. Later that afternoon, while Kit put on different outfits to entertain Ray—and at some point Ray exhibited himself, too, in a green satin gown, made up with Kit’s lipstick and powder—Donny Ross came prowling around where Ann was cutting out the lining for the suit. “Do you mind?” he said. And he called her an angel-innocent and a clever daft thing, in a comical, mincing, falsetto voice. Ann didn’t usually let people into the sewing room; she was anxious about keeping the fabrics pristine. With his hands in his pockets, frowning, Donny was working through some jazz tune to himself, in a way that you couldn’t really call singing; it was more as if he were imitating all the different instruments in turn, taking his hands out of his pockets to bang out the drum part on the end of her cutting table. Ann might just as well not have been there: he threw his head back and stared up into the corners of the room as if all the evidence of her sewing, spread out around him, were simply too frivolous for him to look at. It was peculiar that she didn’t feel any urge to entertain or charm him, though she knew how charming she could be when she tried. She carried on steadily, concentrating on her work, feeling as if some new excitement were waiting folded up inside her, not even tried on yet. Nola met Kit when she dropped in to look at Ann’s designs. She was still wearing her nurse’s uniform; she wanted to keep on working until she married. Kit went all out to win her over, and Nola sat blinking and smiling—her plain black shoes planted together on the floor, her back straight—under the assault of Kit’s mad exuberance, her flattery. Kit really was good fun; when you were with her something new and outrageous could happen at any moment. Going through the drawings, Nola was full of trepidation. The models in Ann’s designs were haughty and impossibly slender, drifting with their noses tipped up disdainfully. This was how she’d learned to draw them at art college; it was only a kind of shorthand, an aspiration. If you knew how to read the designs, they gave all the essential information about seams and darts. “She knows what she’s doing,” Kit reassured Nola. “She’s a genius.” Kit sewed well, and she had a good eye for style; she could work hard when she put her mind to it, but she couldn’t design for toffee or cut a pattern. “Ann’s going to make my fortune for me,” she said. “You wait until we move the business up to London. We’ll be dressing all the stars of stage and screen. I’d put my life in her hands.” “These do look beautiful,” Nola conceded yearningly. “Oh, here—take a penny and make it an even three hundred.”Buy the print » Eventually, they decided on something classic, full-length, very simple, skimming Nola’s figure without hugging it. Ann would use the brocade that Nola had brought for the bodice and the sleeves, and a matching silk satin, if they could find it, for the skirt. “Unless there’s any more of the brocade?” Of course they’d planned all along to ask her this, angling for an invitation to Thwaite Park. And, eagerly, Nola invited them. “Blaise would love to meet you,” she said. Privately, Kit chose to doubt this. “He probably thinks it’s pretty funny,” she said, “being invited to meet his fiancée’s dressmaker. I mean, their love affair’s the most darling romantic story I’ve ever heard, and Nola’s an angel—but what I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall at that wedding! Fishponds meets Thwaite Park.” “What do you know about Fishponds?” Ann said sharply. “Come on, Annie-Pannie. You think it’s pretty extraordinary, too, I know you do. Don’t be chippy, don’t get on your old socialist high horse, just because you’ve got a pash on Mr. Misery-Guts Donny Ross.” So Kit and Ann drove out one Sunday, with Ray and Donny Ross, for a picnic at Thwaite Park. Kit was engaged to Ray by this time, though Ann didn’t take that too seriously; she’d been engaged several times already, and, anyway, Ann knew that the other thing was still going on with Kit’s married man, Charlie, who was a lawyer. Ann had bumped into Charlie recently, out shopping with his wife and children. She’d been waltzing around the fitting room with him only the night before, while Kit played Edith Piaf on the portable Black Box gramophone he’d bought her, yet when he passed her in the street he pretended not to know her, staring at her blankly. His wife was hanging on to his arm, and Charlie held his gloves in his clasped hands behind his back; as Ann looked after them, he waggled his free fingers at her in a jaunty, naughty secret signal. On the day of the picnic it was warm for the first time since winter and the clear air was as heady as spirits. Ray put down the roof on his convertible and drove fast. Kit tied on a head scarf, but Ann hadn’t thought to bring one, so her hair whipped in her face, and by the time they turned in between the crumbling stone gateposts—there were no gates; they must have been requisitioned for the war effort—she was bewildered with the speed and the rushing air. The house was a Palladian box, perfectly proportioned, understated to the point of plainness, its blond stone blackened with soot; sooty sheep grazed on a long meadow sloping down in front of it. A few skinny lambs scampered under the ancient oaks, where new leaves were just beginning to spring out, implausibly, from the gray crusty limbs. There were other cars in the drive and in the car park, because the house and the grounds were open to the public. Laughing and talking confidently—at least, Kit was laughing and confident—they walked right past the main entrance, where tickets were on sale; peacocks were squawking and displaying on the stable wall. Nola had instructed them to come around the side of the house, then press the bell beside a door marked “Private,” in white painted letters. Ann half expected a butler. Donny was stiff with disapproval of class privilege. Blaise Perney—who opened the side door himself, promptly, as if he’d been waiting for them—wasn’t in the least what they’d prepared for. To begin with, he looked younger than Nola: very tall and ugly, diffident and smiling and stooped, with a long bony face and hair like crinkled pale silk. He welcomed them effusively, blushing as if they were doing him a favor, and said that he was so looking forward to getting to know them. Ann thought with relief that Blaise could easily be won over; she always made this assessment, when she first met men, of whether or not she could get around them if she chose to test her power. Charlie, for instance—although he liked her and flirted with her madly—she could never have deflected from his own path in a million years, whereas Ray was a walkover. Blaise said that Nola was packing a picnic in the kitchen. He led them through a succession of shadowy, chilly, gracious rooms with shuttered windows, apologizing for the mess and the state of decay: his dragging foot seemed to be part of his diffidence. These were private rooms, not open to the public, not arranged to look like scenes from the past but with the past and the present simply jumbled together: a cheap little wireless set balanced on a pile of leather-bound books, a milkman’s calendar among the silver-framed photos on a desk whose rolltop was broken, an ordinary electric fire in a huge marble fireplace dirty with wood ash. Ann found this much more romantic; it set her imagination racing. What she could have done with this place if it were hers! In the cavernous, dark kitchen, where the giant-sized iron range was cold and there were fifty dinner plates in a wooden rack, Nola was boiling eggs on a Baby Belling, looking surprisingly at home. Ann’s envy was only fleeting—it was benevolent, gracious. Whatever lay ahead for her, she thought, was better than any house. When they took their picnic outside, Blaise said that they should have seen the gardens when his mother was alive. Nola, in a funny, shapeless flowery dress, squinting and smiling into the sun, looked more like a mother than like anyone’s wife; they saw how she would restore things and bring back order. Scrambling up among birch trees in a little wood, they were out of the way of the visitors on the paths below; the bluebells were like pools of water among the trees, reflecting the sky. Ray and Donny raced like schoolboys and wrestled each other to the ground, while Kit kept up her bubbling talk, making it sound to Blaise as if she and Ann were specialists in old fabrics. Hoping for more brocade, she said, they hadn’t started yet on Nola’s dress. Blaise said they must go in search of the brocade later. There were all sorts of old clothes and fabrics and embroideries upstairs in the cedarwood presses, he told them; he’d hardly looked in there himself but would love them to discover something valuable, which he could sell. “You can help yourself to anything you like. I expect it’s all old junk. I’ll show you around properly when the public have gone. Not that I’m objecting to the public, because they are my bread and butter.” “What happened to your leg, old man?” Ray asked. Blaise apologized, because he wasn’t a war hero. He’d managed to catch the dreaded polio—wasn’t that childish of him? Nola spread out a tablecloth, in a little hollow among the bluebells, while the young doctors interrogated her sternly about neck stiffness, light intolerance, respiratory muscle weakness. Blaise rolled up his trouser leg and Ray and Donny examined his twisted, skinny calf; Kit turned her face away, because she didn’t like looking at sickness or deformed things. Yet Blaise Perney was hardly deformed at all; he’d made a wonderful recovery. He told them that Nola had saved his life, and she laughed with shy pleasure. She said he was just lucky, that was all. The surprise was that Blaise turned out to be as much of a socialist as Donny Ross, even if he did own a deer park. He didn’t object to any of the taxes, he said. The only damn problem was finding enough money to pay them, because old houses these days didn’t come with money attached. Thwaite was a bottomless pit when it came to money. He ought to give the place up, sell it as a hotel or something, but he was too sentimental. Anyway, there were an awful lot of big old houses on the market, and it wasn’t a good time in the hotel business. He and Nola called each other “Dear” and passed each other salt, in a twist of greaseproof paper, to go with the eggs. Kit had made little crustless sandwiches with cucumber and foie gras from a tin, and pinched bottles of champagne from her father’s wine cellar. She still lived at home in the suburbs with her widowed daddy, retired from his insurance job, whom she adored—though Ann thought he was a horrible old man. He’d told her once that little tarts ought to be flogged, to teach them a lesson. They drank his champagne anyway, from eighteenth-century glasses, which they’d brought from the house because Blaise couldn’t find anything else. When the champagne was finished, Kit brought out a bottle of her father’s Armagnac—“I won’t half be in trouble,” she said—and they started in on that. And somehow that afternoon they achieved that miraculous drunkenness you get only once or twice in a lifetime, brilliant and without consequences, not peaking and subsiding but running weightlessly on and on. Afterward, Ann could hardly remember any subject they’d talked about, or what had seemed so clever or so funny. When they wandered on the grounds in the evening, after the public had gone, Nola took off her black shoes and walked carefree in her stockings. And Donny Ross’s pursuit of Ann was as intent and tense as a stalking cat’s: invisible to everyone else, it seemed to her to flash through all the disparate, hazy successive phases of the afternoon like a sparking, dangerous live wire. They lay close together but not touching, in the long grass under a tall ginkgo tree, whose leaves were shaped like exquisite tiny paddles, translucent bright grass-green. The light faded in the sky to a deep turquoise and the peacocks came to roost in the tree above them, clotted lumps of darkness, with their long tails hanging down like bellpulls. Their drunkenness ought to have ended in some shame or disaster—Ray had drunk as much as the rest of them, and he was driving them home—but it didn’t. They didn’t break any of the lovely glasses etched with vine leaves; no one threw up or said anything unforgivable; no one was killed. They didn’t even feel too bad the next day. Ray delivered the girls decorously back, eventually, to the doorsteps of their respective houses in Fishponds and Stoke Bishop. On the way home, Kit said what a sweetheart Blaise was—and what a fabulous place, imagine landing that! Didn’t Ann just wish she’d got to him first, before Nola Higgins? Then Ann, with her drunken special insight, said that Blaise wasn’t really what he seemed. He wasn’t actually very easy. He’d seen right through them and he didn’t like them very much. He saw how they condescended to Nola, even if Nola didn’t see it. Kit said indignantly that she’d never condescended to anybody in her life. They had not, after all, gone back inside Thwaite House to look in the cedarwood presses. No one had had any appetite, in the intensity of their present, for the past. When they had parted finally, because the medics were on night duty and had to get back, they all made passionate promises to return. The next time they came, Blaise said, he would show them everything. They couldn’t wait, they told him. Soon. That was in 1953. When Sally Ross was sixteen, in 1972, her mother, Ann, made her a jacket out of an old length of silk brocade, embroidered with flowers. The white brocade had been around since Sally could remember, folded in a cupboard along with all the other pieces of fabric that might be used sometime, for something or other. Now they decided to dye it purple. This was the same summer that Sally’s father, the doctor, had moved out to live with another woman. Ann had sold all his jazz records and chopped his ties into bits with her dressmaking scissors, then burned them in the garden. Of course, Sally and her sisters and brother were on their mother’s side. Still, they were shocked by something so vengeful and flaunting, which they’d never before imagined as part of her character. Her gestures seemed drawn from a different life than the one they’d had so far, in which things had been mostly funny and full of irony. Sally and her mother were absorbed together that summer in projects of transformation, changing their clothes or their rooms or themselves. Sally stood over the soup of murky cold-dye in the old washing-up bowl, watching for the blisters of fabric to erupt above the surface, prodding them down with the stained handle of a wooden spoon, feeling hopeful in spite of everything. She wasn’t beautiful like her mother, but Ann made her feel that there was a way around that. Ann always had a plan—and Sally yielded to the gifted, forceful hands that came plucking at her eyebrows or twisting up her hair, whipping the tape measure around her waistline. The jacket was a success: Sally wore it a lot, unbuttoned over T-shirts and jeans. They both dieted, and her mother lost a stone; she’d never looked so lovely. Ann got a babysitter and went out to parties with spare knickers and a toothbrush in her handbag, but came home alone. At the end of the summer, their father moved back in again. Sally had always known that the white brocade had belonged to a lady who died before her wedding. The man she was meant to marry had owned a stately home with a deer park, and the twist in the story was that she’d been a nurse, had saved his life when he was ill. Ann and Kit Seaton—who was Sally’s godmother—had picnicked with them once in the deer park. Then the nurse had caught diphtheria from one of her patients and was dead within a week. Her fiancé had written to them, returning their designs and saying that he would not need their services after all, “for the saddest of reasons.” They hadn’t known what to do with the fabric, Ann said. They couldn’t just post it to him. They hadn’t even sent a note—they couldn’t think what words to use; they were too young. Ann hadn’t kept his letter or her designs; she regretted now that she’d hardly kept anything when she got married and she and Kit gave up the business. There were only a few woven Gallagher and Seaton labels, tangled in a snarled mass of thread and bias binding and rickrack braid in her workbasket. She and Kit had never even thought to take photographs of the clothes they’d made. One weekend that summer Sally found herself at the very scene of her mother’s stories, Thwaite Park, which was now used as a teacher-training college. Sally’s boyfriend was an art student, and he worked part time for a company that catered conferences and receptions; she helped out when they needed extra staff. She wore her jacket to Thwaite deliberately, and hung it up on a hook in the kitchen. Her job that day was mostly behind the scenes, washing plates and cups and cutlery in a deep Belfast sink, while the hot-water urn wheezed and gurgled through its cycles. The kitchen was as dark as a cave, its cream-painted walls greenish with age, erupting in mineral crusts. After the conference lunch, in a lull while the teachers drank coffee outside in the sunshine, Sally wandered upstairs to look around. Although the rooms of the house had been converted into teaching spaces, with bookshelves and blackboards and overhead projectors, you could see that it had been a home once. One of the rooms was papered with Chinese wallpaper, pale blue, patterned with birds and bamboo leaves. In another room, polished wood cupboards were built in from floor to ceiling; these were full of stationery supplies and art materials. Someone from the catering staff had followed Sally upstairs, and she found herself explaining the whole story to him—about her parents separating and the jacket and her mother’s sad association with the house. This wasn’t her boyfriend but another boy who worked with them, better-looking and more dangerous. Sally was trying her power out on him; she shed tears of self-pity, until he put his arms around her and kissed her. And, amid all the complications and adjustments that ensued, she forgot to collect her jacket when they left, though she didn’t confess this to her mother until months later. A jacket hardly mattered, in the scheme of things.

I have somehow become a woman who yells, and, because I do not want to be a woman who yells, whose little children walk around with frozen, watchful faces, I have taken to lacing on my running shoes after dinner and going out into the twilit streets for a walk, leaving the undressing and sluicing and reading and singing and tucking in of the boys to my husband, a man who does not yell. The neighborhood goes dark as I walk, and a second neighborhood unrolls atop the daytime one. We have few street lights, and those I pass under make my shadow frolic; it lags behind me, gallops to my feet, gambols on ahead. The only other illumination is from the windows in the houses I pass and the moon that orders me to look up, look up! Feral cats dart underfoot, bird-of-paradise flowers poke out of the shadows, smells are exhaled into the air: oak dust, slime mold, camphor. Northern Florida is cold in January and I walk fast for warmth but also because, although the neighborhood is antique—huge Victorian houses radiating outward into nineteen-twenties bungalows, then mid-century modern ranches at the edges—it’s imperfectly safe. There was a rape a month ago, a jogger in her fifties pulled into the azaleas; and, a week ago, a pack of loose pit bulls ran down a mother with a baby in her stroller and mauled both, though not to death. It’s not the dogs’ fault, it’s the owners’ fault! dog-lovers shouted on the neighborhood e-mail list, and it’s true, it was the owners’ fault, but also those dogs were sociopaths. When the suburbs were built, in the seventies, the historic houses in the center of the town were abandoned to graduate students who heated beans over Bunsen burners on the heart-pine floors and sliced apartments out of ballrooms. When neglect and humidity caused the houses to rot and droop and develop rusty scales, there was a second abandonment, to poor people, squatters. We moved here ten years ago because our house was cheap and had virgin-lumber bones, and because I decided that if I had to live in the South, with its boiled peanuts and its Spanish moss dangling like armpit hair, at least I wouldn’t barricade myself with my whiteness in a gated community. Isn’t it . . . dicey? people our parents’ age would say, grimacing, when we told them where we lived, and it took all my will power not to say, Do you mean black, or just poor? Because it was both. White middle-classness has since infected the neighborhood, though, and now everything is frenzied with renovation. In the past few years the black people have mostly withdrawn. The homeless stayed for a while, because our neighborhood abuts Bo Diddley Plaza, where, until recently, churches handed out food and God, and where Occupy rolled in like a tide and claimed the right to sleep there, then grew tired of being dirty and rolled out, leaving behind a human flotsam of homeless in sleeping bags. During our first months in the house, we hosted a homeless couple we only ever saw slinking off in the dawn: at dusk, they would silently lift off the latticework to the crawl space under our house and then sleep there, their roof our bedroom floor, and when we got up in the middle of the night we tried to walk softly because it felt rude to step inches above the face of a dreaming person. On my nighttime walks the neighbors’ lives reveal themselves, the lit windows domestic aquariums. At times, I’m the silent witness to fights that look like slow-dancing without music. It is astonishing how people live, the messes they sustain, the delicious whiffs of cooking that carry to the street, the holiday decorations that slowly seep into daily décor. All January, I watched a Christmas bouquet of roses on one mantel diminish until the flowers were a blighted shrivel and the water green scum, a huge Santa on a stick still beaming merrily out of the ruins. Window after window nears, freezes with its blue fog of television light or its couple hunched over a supper of pizza, holds as I pass, then slides into the forgotten. I think of the way water gathers as it slips down an icicle’s length, pauses to build its glossy drop, becomes too fat to hang on, plummets down. There is one mostly windowless place in the neighborhood, a yellow brick monstrosity that I love nevertheless, because it houses nuns. There used to be six nuns there, but attrition happened, as it does with very old ladies, and now there are only three kindly sisters squeaking around that immense space in their sensible shoes. A Realtor friend told us that when it was built, in the nineteen-fifties, a bomb shelter was lowered into the porous limestone of the back yard, and during sleepless nights, when my body is in bed but my brain is still out walking in the dark, I like to imagine the nuns in full regalia in their shelter, singing hymns and spinning on a stationary bike to keep the light bulb sputtering on, while, aboveground, all has been blasted black and rusted hinges rasp the wind. Because the nights are so cold, I share the streets with few people. There’s a young couple who jog at a pace slightly slower than my fast walk. I follow them, listening to their patter of wedding plans and fights with friends. Once I forgot myself and laughed at something they said and their faces owled, unnerved, back at me, then they trotted faster and took the first turn they found and I let them disappear into the black. There’s an elegant, tall woman who walks a Great Dane the color of dryer lint; I am afraid that the woman is unwell because she walks rigidly, her face pulsing as if intermittently electrified by pain. I sometimes imagine how, should I barrel around a corner to find her slumped on the ground, I would drape her over her dog, smack his withers, and watch as he, with his great dignity, carried her home. There is a boy of fifteen or so, tremendously fat, whose shirt is always off and who is always on the treadmill on his glassed-in porch. No matter how many times I find myself sailing past his window, there he is, his footsteps pounding so hard I can hear them from two blocks away. Because all the lights are on, to him there is nothing beyond the black in the window, and I wonder if he watches his reflection the way I watch him, if he sees how with each step his stomach ripples as if it were a pond into which someone had tossed a fist-size stone. There’s the shy muttering homeless lady, a collector of cans, who hoists her clanging bags on the back of her bicycle and uses the old carriage blocks in front of the grander houses to mount her ride; the waft of her makes me think of the wealthy Southern dames in dark silk who once used those blocks to climb into their carriages, emitting a similarly intimate feminine smell. There’s the man who hisses nasties as he stands under the light outside a bodega with bars over its windows. I put on my don’t-fuck-with-me face, and he has yet to do more than hiss, but there is a part of me that is more than ready, that wants to use what’s building up. Sometimes I think I see the stealthy couple who lived under our house, the particular angle of his solicitousness, his hand on her back, but when I come closer it is only a papaya tree bent over a rain barrel or two boys smoking in the bushes, who turn wary as I pass. And then there’s the therapist who every night sits at his desk in the study of his Victorian, which looks like a rotting galleon. He was caught in bed with the wife of one of his patients; the patient had a loaded shotgun out in the car. The wife died in coitus and the therapist survived with a bullet still in his hip, which makes him lurch when he gets up to pour himself more Scotch. There are rumors that he visits the cuckolded murderer in prison every week, though whether his motive is kindness or crowing remains in the shadows, as if motives could ever be pure. My husband and I had just moved in when the murder occurred; we were scraping rotting paint off the oak moldings in our dining room when the gunshots splattered the air, but of course we believed they were fireworks lit by the kids who lived a few houses down. As I walk, I see strangers but also people I know. I look up in the beginning of February to see a close friend in a pink leotard in her window, stretching, but then, with a zip of understanding, I realize that she isn’t stretching, she is drying her legs, and the leotard is in fact her body, pinked from the hot shower. Even though I visited her in the hospital when both of her boys were born, held the newborns in my arms when they still smelled of her, saw the raw Cesarean split, it isn’t until I watch her drying herself that I understand that she is a sexual being, and then the next time we speak I can’t help but blush and endure images of her in extreme sexual positions. Mostly, however, I see the mothers I know in glimpses, bent like shepherdess crooks, scanning the floor for tiny Legos or half-chewed grapes or the people they once were slumped in the corners. It’s too much, it’s too much, I shout at my husband some nights when I come home, and he looks at me, afraid, this giant gentle man, and sits up in bed over his computer and says, softly, I don’t think you’ve walked it off yet, sweets, you may want to take one more loop. I go out again, furious, because the streets become more dangerous this late at night, and how dare he suggest risk like this to me, when I have proved myself vulnerable; but, then again, perhaps my warm house has become more dangerous as well. During the day, while my sons are in school, I can’t stop reading about the disaster of the world, the glaciers dying like living creatures, the great Pacific trash gyre, the hundreds of unrecorded deaths of species, millennia snuffed out as if they were not precious. I read and savagely mourn, as if reading could somehow sate this hunger for grief, instead of what it does, which is fuel it. I have mostly stopped caring where I walk, but I try to be at the Duck Pond every night when the Christmas lights, forgotten for weeks now, click off and the pond erupts, the frogs launching into their syncopated song like a nursery school let loose in a room of untuned lutes. Our pair of black swans would shout at the frogs with their brass voices as if to shut them up, but, outnumbered, the birds would soon give up and climb the island in the center of the pond and twine their necks together to sleep. The swans had four cygnets last spring, sweet cheeping puffs that were the delight of my little boys, who tossed dog food at them every day, until one morning, while the swans were distracted by our food, one cygnet gave a choked peep, bobbed, then went down; it came up again but across the pond, in the paws of an otter that ate it in small bites, floating serenely on its back. The otter got one more cygnet before the wildlife service arrived to scoop up the remaining two, but it was later reported in the neighborhood newsletter that the tiny swan hearts had given out in fear. The parent swans floated for months, inconsolable, though perhaps this is a projection, for, since they are both black swans and parents, they are already prefeathered in mourning. On Valentine’s Day, I see red and white lights flashing from afar at the nunnery and walk faster in the hope that the nuns are having a love party, a disco rager, but instead I see an ambulance drive away, and the next day my fears are confirmed: the nuns have been further diminished, to two. Withholding erotic pleasure for the glory of God seems an anachronism in our age of pleasure, and, with their frailty and the hugeness of the house they rattle around in, it has been decided that the remaining nuns must decamp. I come to watch them the night they leave, expecting a moving truck, but there are only a few leather suitcases and a box or two in the back of the nuns’ station wagon. Their wrinkled faces droop with relief as they drive off. The cold lingers on into March. It has been a hard winter for everyone, though not as terrible as in the North, and I think of my friends and family up there with their dirty walls of snow and try to remember that the camellias and peach trees and dogwoods and oranges are all abloom here, even in the dark. I smell the jasmine potent in my hair the next morning, the way I used to smell cigarette smoke and sweat after going to a night club, back when I was young and could do such unthinkable things. There is a vernacular style of architecture, called Cracker, which is not meant to cause offense, all porches and high ceilings; and by the middle of March one of the oldest Cracker houses in north-central Florida is being renovated. The façade is preserved, but the rest is gutted. Night by night, I see what remains of the house as daily it is stripped away, until one night the house has entirely vanished: that morning it collapsed on a worker, who survived, like Buster Keaton, by standing in the window as the structure fell. I study the hole where a humble and unremarked history stood for so long, a house that watched the town press up, then grow around it, and I think of the construction worker who walked out of the collapse unhurt, what he was imagining. I think I know. One night just before Christmas I came home late after a walk and my husband was in the bathroom and I flipped open his computer and saw what I saw there, a conversation not meant for me, a snip of flesh that was not his, and without letting him know I was in the house I about-faced and went out again and walked until it was too cold to walk, until just before dawn, when the dew could easily have been ice. Now, while I stand before the collapsed house, the woman with the Great Dane slides by through the dark, and I notice how aggressively pale she has become, so skinny her cheeks must touch inside her mouth, her wig askew to show a rind of scalp above the bangs. If she, in turn, notices the particular dark spike of my unrest, she says only a soft good night and her dog looks at me with a kind of human compassion, and together they move off, stately and gentle, into the black. Most changes are not so swift as the fallen house, and I notice how much weight the boy in his glassed-in sunporch has lost only when I realize from the sound of his footsteps that he’s no longer walking on his treadmill but running, and I look at him closely for the first time in a long time, my dear flabby friend whom I took for granted, and see a transformation so astonishing it’s as if a maiden had turned into a birch tree or a stream. During these few months this overweight child has turned into a slender man with pectoral rosebuds on his chest, sweating, smiling at himself in the glass, and I yelp aloud because of the swiftness of youth, these gorgeous changes that insist that not everything is decaying faster than we can love it. I walk on and as the boy’s trotting noises fade I keep hearing a disquieting constant sound that I can’t place. It is a sticky night: I shed my jacket last week, and it is only gradually that I understand that the noise is coming from the first air-conditioner turned on for the year. Soon they’ll all be on, crouched like trolls under the windows, their collective tuneless hum drowning out the night birds and frogs, and time will leap forward and the night will grow more and more reluctant to descend and, in the cool linger of twilight, people longing for real air after the sickly fake cold all day will come out and I will no longer have my dangerous dark streets to myself. There’s a pleasant smell like campfires in the air, and I think that the old turpentine-pine forests that ring the city must be on fire, which happens once a year or so, and I wonder about all those poor birds seared out of their sleep and into the disorienting darkness. I discover the next morning that it was worse, a controlled burn over the acres where dozens of the homeless had been living in a tent city, and I walk down to look, but it’s all great oaks, lonely and blackened from the waist down in a plain of steaming charcoal. When I return and see the six-foot fences around Bo Diddley Plaza which had gone up that same night for construction, or so the signs say, it is clear that it is part of a larger plan, balletically executed. I stand squinting in the daylight wanting to yell, looking to find a displaced person. Please, I think, please let my couple come by, let me see their faces at last, let me take their arms. I want to make them sandwiches and give them blankets and tell them that it’s O.K., that they can live under my house. I’m glad I can’t find anyone later, when I remember that it is not a kind thing to tell human beings that they can live under your house. The week of heat proves temporary, a false start to the season. The weather again turns so clammy and cold that nobody else comes out and I shiver as I walk until I escape my chill by going into the drugstore for Epsom salts to soak my walking away. It is astonishing to enter the dazzling color, the ferocious heat after the chilly gray scale; to travel hundreds of miles over the cracked sidewalk and sparse palmetto and black path-crossing cats I dart away from, into this abundance with its aisles of gaudy trash and useless wrapping and plastic pull tabs that will one day end up in the throat of the earth’s last sea turtle. I find myself limping and the limp morphs into a kind of pained bopping because the music dredges up elementary school, when my parents were, astonishingly, younger than I am now, and that one long summer they listened on repeat to Paul Simon singing over springy African drums about a trip with a son, the human trampoline, the window in the heart; and it is both too much and too little and I leave without the salts because I am not ready for such easy absolution as this. I can’t. And so I walk and I walk and at some point, near the wildly singing frogs, I look up and out of the darkness, a stun: the new possessor of the old nunnery has installed uplighting, not on the aesthetic blank of the cube but, rather, on the ardent live oak in front of it, so old and so broad it spreads out over a half acre. I’ve always known the tree was there, and my children have often swung on its low branches and from the bark plucked out ferns and epiphytes with which to adorn my head. But it has never before announced itself fully as the colossus it is, with its branches that are so heavy they grow toward the ground then touch and grow upward again; and thus, elbowing itself up, it brings to mind a woman at the kitchen table, knuckling her chin and dreaming. I stand shocked by its beauty, and, as I look, I imagine the swans on their island seeing the bright spark in the night and feeling their swan hearts moved. I heard that they have started building a nest again, though how they can bear it after all they’ve lost I do not know. I hope they understand, my sons, both now and in the future just materializing in the dark, that all these hours their mother has been walking so swiftly away from them I have not been gone, that my spirit, hours ago, slipped back into the house and crept into the room where their early-rising father had already fallen asleep, usually before 8 P.M., and that I touched this gentle man whom I love so desperately and somehow fear so much, touched him on the pulse in his temple and felt his dreams, which are too distant for the likes of me, and I climbed the creaking old stairs and at the top split in two and, heading right and left into separate rooms, slid through the crack under the doors and curled myself on the pillows to breathe into me the breath my boys breathed out. Every pause between the end of one breath and the beginning of the next is long; then again, nothing is not always in transition. Soon, tomorrow, the boys will be men, then the men will leave the house, and my husband and I will look at each other crouching under the weight of all that we wouldn’t or couldn’t yell, and all those hours outside walking, my body, my shadow, and the moon. It is terribly true, even if the truth does not comfort, that if you look at the moon for long enough night after night, as I have, you will see that the old cartoons are correct, that the moon is, in fact, laughing, but not at us, we who are too small and our lives too fleeting for it to give us any notice at all.

After so many study guides, so many practice tests and proficiency and achievement tests, it would have been impossible for us not to learn something, but we forgot everything almost right away and, I’m afraid, for good. The thing that we did learn, and to perfection—the thing that we would remember for the rest of our lives—was how to copy on tests. Here I could easily ad-lib an homage to the cheat sheet, all the test material reproduced in tiny but legible script on a minuscule bus ticket. But that admirable workmanship would have been worth very little if we hadn’t also had the all-important skill and audacity when the crucial moment came: the instant the teacher lowered his guard and the ten or twenty golden seconds began. At our school in particular, which in theory was the strictest in Chile, it turned out that copying was fairly easy, since many of the tests were multiple choice. We still had years to go before taking the Academic Aptitude Test and applying to university, but our teachers wanted to familiarize us right away with multiple-choice exercises, and although they designed up to four different versions of every test, we always found a way to pass information along. We didn’t have to write anything or form opinions or develop any ideas of our own; all we had to do was play the game and guess the trick. Of course we studied, sometimes a lot, but it was never enough. I guess the idea was to lower our morale. Even if we did nothing but study, we knew that there would always be two or three impossible questions. We didn’t complain. We got the message: cheating was just part of the deal. I think that, thanks to our cheating, we were able to let go of some of our individualism and become a community. It’s sad to put it like that, but copying gave us solidarity. Every once in a while we suffered from guilt, from the feeling that we were frauds—especially when we looked ahead to the future—but our indolence and defiance prevailed. We didn’t have to take religion—the grade didn’t affect our averages—but getting out of it was a long bureaucratic process, and Mr. Segovia’s classes were really fun. He’d go on and on in an endless soliloquy about any subject but religion; his favorite, in fact, was sex, and the teachers at our school he wanted to have it with. Every class we’d do a quick round of confessions: each of us had to disclose a sin, and after listening to all forty-five—which ranged from I kept the change to I want to grab my neighbor’s tits and I jacked off during recess, always a classic—the teacher would tell us that none of our sins were unforgivable. I think it was Cordero who confessed one day that he had copied someone’s answers in math, and since Segovia didn’t react we all contributed variations of the same: I copied on the Spanish test, on the science test, on the P.E. test (laughter), and so on. Segovia, suppressing a smile, said that he forgave us, but that we had to make sure we didn’t get caught, because that would really be unforgivable. Suddenly, though, he became serious. “If you are all so dishonest at twelve,” he said, “at forty you’re going to be worse than the Covarrubias twins.” We asked him who the Covarrubias twins were, and he looked as if he were going to tell us, but then he thought better of it. We kept at him, but he didn’t want to explain. Later, we asked other teachers and even the guidance counsellor, but no one wanted to tell us the story. The reasons were diffuse: it was a secret, a delicate subject, possibly something that would damage the school’s impeccable reputation. We soon forgot the matter, in any case. Five years later, it was 1993 and we were seniors. One day, when Cordero, Parraguez, little Carlos, and I were playing hooky, we ran into Mr. Segovia coming out of the Tarapacá pool hall. He wasn’t a teacher anymore; he was a Metro conductor now, and it was his day off. He treated us to Coca-Colas, and ordered a shot of pisco for himself, though it was early to start drinking. It was then that he finally told us the story of the Covarrubias twins. Covarrubias family tradition dictated that the firstborn son should be named Luis Antonio, but when Covarrubias senior found out that twins were on the way he decided to divide his name between them. During their first years of life, Luis and Antonio Covarrubias enjoyed—or suffered through—the excessively equal treatment that parents tend to give to twins: the same haircut, the same clothes, the same class in the same school. When the twins were ten years old, Covarrubias senior installed a partition in their room, and he sawed cleanly through the old bunk bed to make two identical single beds. The idea was to give the twins a certain amount of privacy, but the change wasn’t all that significant, because they still talked through the partition every night before falling asleep. They inhabited different hemispheres now, but it was a small planet. When the twins were twelve they entered the National Institute, and that was their first real separation. Since the seven hundred and twenty incoming seventh graders were distributed randomly, the twins were placed in different classes for the first time ever. They felt pretty lost in that school, which was so huge and impersonal, but they were strong and determined to persevere in their new lives. Despite the relentless avalanche of looks and stupid jokes from their classmates (“I think I’m seeing double!”), they always met at lunch to eat together. At the end of seventh grade, they had to choose between fine art and music; they both chose art, in the hope that they’d be placed together, but they were out of luck. At the end of eighth grade, when they had to choose between French and English, they planned to go with French, which, as the minority choice, would practically insure that they’d be in the same class. But, after a sermon from Covarrubias senior about the importance of knowing English in today’s savage and competitive world, they gave in. Things went no better for them in their freshman and sophomore years, when students were grouped based on ranking, even though they both had good grades. For their junior year, the twins chose a humanities focus, and finally they were together: in Class 3-F. Being classmates again after four years apart was fun and strange. Their physical similarity was still extraordinary, although acne had been cruel to Luis’s face, and Antonio was showing signs of wanting to stand out: his hair was long, or what passed for long back then, and the layer of gel that plastered it back gave him a less conventional appearance than his brother’s. Luis kept the classic cut, military style, his hair two fingers above his shirt collar, as the regulations stipulated. Antonio also wore wider pants and, defying the rules, often went to school in black tennis shoes instead of dress shoes. The twins sat together during the first months of the school year. They protected and helped each other, though when they fought they seemed to hate each other, which, of course, is the most natural thing in the world: there are moments when we hate ourselves, and if we have someone in front of us who is almost exactly like us our hate is inevitably directed toward that person. But around the middle of the year, for no obvious reason, their fights became harsher, and, at the same time, Antonio lost all interest in his studies. Luis’s life, on the other hand, continued along its orderly path. He kept his record spotless, and his grades were very good; in fact, he was first in his class that year. Incredibly, his brother was last and would have to repeat the grade, and that was how the twins’ paths diverged again. There was only one school counsellor for more than four thousand students, but he took an interest in the twins’ case and called their parents in for a meeting. He offered the theory, not necessarily true, that Antonio had been driven by an unconscious desire (the counsellor explained to them, quickly and accurately, exactly what the unconscious was) not to be in the same class as his brother. Luis sailed through his senior year with excellent grades, and he got outstanding scores on all the university entrance tests, especially History of Chile and Social Studies, on which he nearly got the highest score in the nation. He entered the University of Chile to study law, on a full scholarship. “From nine until one, you’ll be getting nothing done. From one until five, you’ll be asking yourself how that was possible.”Buy the print » The twins were never as distant from each other as they were during Luis’s first months in college. Antonio was jealous when he saw his brother leaving for the university, free now of his uniform, while he was still stuck in high school. Some mornings their schedules coincided, but thanks to a tacit and elegant agreement—some version, perhaps, of the famous twin telepathy—they never boarded the same bus. They avoided each other, barely greeting each other, though they knew that their estrangement couldn’t last forever. One night, when Luis was already in his second semester of law, Antonio started talking to him again through the partition. “How’s college?” he asked. “In what sense?” “The girls,” Antonio clarified. “Oh, there are some really hot girls,” Luis replied, trying not to sound boastful. “Yeah, I know there are girls, but how do you do it?” “How do we do what?” said Luis, who, deep down, knew exactly what his brother was asking. “How do you fart with girls around?” “Well, you just have to hold it in,” Luis answered. They spent that night, as they had when they were children, talking and laughing while they competed with their farts and their burps, and from then on they were once again inseparable. They kept up the illusion of independence, especially from Monday to Friday, but on weekends they always went out together, matched each other drink for drink, and played tricks switching places, taking advantage of the fact that, thanks to Luis’s newly long hair and now clear skin, their physical resemblance was almost absolute again. Antonio’s academic performance had improved a great deal, but he still wasn’t a model student and toward the end of his senior year he began to get anxious. Though he felt prepared for the aptitude test, he wasn’t sure that he would be able to score high enough to study law at the University of Chile, like his brother. The idea was Antonio’s, naturally, but Luis accepted right away, without blackmail or conditions, and without an ounce of fear, since at no point did he consider it possible that they would be found out. In December of that year, Luis Covarrubias registered, presenting his brother Antonio’s I.D. card, to take the test for the second time, and he gave it his all. He tried so hard that he got even better scores than he had the year before: in fact, he received the nation’s highest score on the Social Studies test. “But none of us have twin brothers,” Cordero said that afternoon, when Segovia finished his story. It may have been drizzling or raining, I don’t remember, but I know that the teacher was wearing a blue raincoat. He got up to buy cigarettes, and when he came back to our table he stayed on his feet, maybe to reëstablish a protocol that had been lost: the teacher stands, the students sit. “You’ll still come out ahead,” he told us. “You all don’t know how privileged you are.” “Because we go to the National Institute?” I asked. He puffed anxiously on his cigarette, perhaps already somewhat drunk, and he was silent for so long that it was no longer necessary to answer me, but then an answer came. “The National Institute is rotten, but the world is rotten,” he said. “They prepared you for this, for a world where everyone fucks everyone over. You’ll do well on the test, very well, don’t worry: you all weren’t educated; you were trained.” It sounded aggressive, but there was no contempt in his tone, or, at least, none directed at us. We were quiet; it was late by then, almost nighttime. He sat down, looking absorbed, thoughtful. “I didn’t get a high score,” he said, when it seemed that there wouldn’t be any more words. “I was the best in my class, in my whole school. I never cheated on an exam, but I bombed the aptitude test, so I had to study religious pedagogy. I didn’t even believe in God.” I asked him if now, as a Metro conductor, he earned more money. “Twice as much,” he replied. I asked him if he believed in God now, and he answered that yes, now more than ever, he believed in God. I never forgot, I’ll never forget his gesture then: with a lit cigarette between his index and middle fingers, he looked at the back of his hand as if searching for his veins, and then he turned it over, as if to make sure that his life, head, and heart lines were still there. We said goodbye as if we were or had once been friends. He went into the cinema, and we headed down Bulnes toward Parque Almagro to smoke a few joints. I never heard anything more about Segovia. Sometimes, in the Metro, when I get into the first car, I look toward the conductor’s booth and imagine that our teacher is in there, pressing buttons and yawning. As for the Covarrubias twins, they’ve gained a certain amount of fame, and, as I understand it, they never separated again. They became identical lawyers; I hear that it’s hard to tell which is the more brilliant and which the more corrupt. They have a firm in Vitacura, and they charge the same rate. They charge what such good service is worth: a lot. Questions: 1. According to the text, the Covarrubias twins’ experience in their new school: (A) Marked their final break with the values that their parents had instilled in them. (B) Was traumatic, because it forced them to make rash decisions and separated them for good. (C) Gradually shaped them into individuals who would be useful in Chilean society. (D) Transformed two good and supportive brothers into unscrupulous sons of bitches. (E) Marked the start of a difficult period, from which they emerged stronger and ready to compete in this ruthless and materialistic world. 2. The best title for this story would be: (A) “How to Train Your Twin” (B) “To Sir, with Love” (C) “Me and My Shadow” (D) “Against Lawyers” (E) “Against Twin Lawyers” 3. Regarding multiple-choice tests, the author affirms that: I. They were in standard use at that particular school in order to prepare students for the university entrance exams. II. It was easier to cheat on those tests, any way you looked at it. III. They did not require you to develop your own thinking. IV. With multiple-choice tests, the teachers didn’t have to make themselves sick in the head by grading all weekend. V. The correct choice is almost always D. (A) I and II (B) I, III, and V (C) II and V (D) I, II, and III (E) I, II, and IV 4. The fact that Mr. Luis Antonio Covarrubias divided his name between his twin sons indicates that he was: (A) Innovative (B) Ingenious (C) Unbiased (D) Masonic (E) Moronic 5. One can infer from the text that the teachers at the school: (A) Were mediocre and cruel, because they adhered unquestioningly to a rotten educational model. (B) Were cruel and severe: they liked to torture the students by overloading them with homework. (C) Were deadened by sadness, because they got paid shit. (D) Were cruel and severe, because they were sad. Everyone was sad back then. (E) My bench mate marked C, so I’m going to mark C as well. 6. From this text, one understands that: (A) The students copied on tests because they lived under a dictatorship, and that justified everything. (B) Copying on tests isn’t so bad as long as you’re smart about it. (C) Copying on tests is part of the learning process for any human being. (D) The students with the worst scores on the university entrance exams often become religion teachers. (E) Religion teachers are fun, but they don’t necessarily believe in God. 7. The purpose of this story is: (A) To suggest a possible work opportunity for Chilean students who perform well academically but are poor (there aren’t many, but they do exist): they could take tests for students who are lazy and rich. (B) To expose security problems in the administration of the university entrance exams, and also to promote a business venture related to biometric readings, or some other system for definitively verifying the identity of students. (C) To promote an expensive law firm. And to entertain. (D) To legitimate the experience of a generation that could be summed up as “a band of cheaters.” And to entertain. (E) To erase the wounds of the past. 8. Which of Mr. Segovia’s following statements is, in your opinion, true? (A) You all weren’t educated; you were trained. (B) You all weren’t educated; you were trained. (C) You all weren’t educated; you were trained. (D) You all weren’t educated; you were trained. (E) You all weren’t educated; you were trained.

Outside an isolated Ojibwe country trading post in the year 1839, Mink was making an incessant racket. She wanted what Mackinnon had, trader’s milk—a mixture of raw distilled spirits, rum, red pepper, and tobacco. She had bawled and screeched her way to possession of a keg before. The noise pared at Mackinnon’s nerves, but he wouldn’t beat her into silence. Mink was from a family of powerful healers. She had been the beautiful daughter of Shingobii, a supplier of rich furs. She had also been the beautiful wife of Mashkiig, until he destroyed her face and stabbed her younger brothers to death. Their eleven-year-old daughter huddled with her now, under the same greasy blanket, trying to hide. Inside the post, Mackinnon’s clerk, Wolfred Roberts, had swathed his head in a fox pelt to muffle the sound, fastening the desiccated paws beneath his chin. He wrote in an elegant, sloping hand, three items between lines. Out there in the bush, they were always afraid of running out of paper. Wolfred had left his home in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, because he was the youngest of four brothers and there was no room for him in the family business—a bakery. His mother was the daughter of a schoolteacher, and she had educated him. He was just seventeen. He missed her, and he missed the books. He had taken only two with him when he was sent to clerk with Mackinnon: a pocket dictionary and Xenophon’s “Anabasis and Memorabilia,” which had belonged to his grandfather, and which his mother hadn’t known contained lewd descriptions. Even with the fox on his head, the screeching rattled him. He tried to clean up around the fireplace, and threw a pile of scraps out for the dogs. As soon as he walked back inside, there was pandemonium. Mink and her daughter were fighting the dogs off. The noise was hideous. Don’t go out there. I forbid you, Mackinnon said. If the dogs kill and eat them, there will be less trouble. The humans eventually won the fight, but the noise continued into darkness. Mink started hollering again before sunup. Her high-pitched wailing was even louder now. The men were scratchy-eyed and tired. Mackinnon kicked her, or kicked one of them, as he passed. She went hoarse that afternoon, which only made her voice more irritating. Something in it had changed, Wolfred thought. He didn’t understand the language very well. That rough old bitch wants to sell me her daughter, Mackinnon said. Mink’s voice was horrid—intimate with filth—as she described the things the girl could do if Mackinnon would only give over the milk. She was directing the full force of her shrieks at the closed door. Part of Wolfred’s job was to catch and clean fish if Mackinnon asked. He went down to the hole he kept open in the icy river, crossing himself as he walked past Mink. Although of course he wasn’t Catholic, the gesture had cachet where Jesuits had been. When he returned, Mink was gone and the girl was inside the post, crouching in the corner underneath a new blanket, her head down, still as death. I couldn’t stand it another minute, Mackinnon said. Wolfred stared at the blanketed lump of girl. Mackinnon had always been honest, for a trader. Fair, for a trader, and showed no signs of moral corruption beyond the usual—selling rum to Indians was outlawed. Wolfred could not take in what had happened, so again he went fishing. When he came back with another stringer of whitefish, his mind was clear. Mackinnon was a rescuer, he decided. He had saved the girl from Mink, and from a slave’s fate elsewhere. Wolfred chopped some kindling and built a small cooking fire beside the post. He roasted the fish whole, and Mackinnon ate them with last week’s tough bread. Tomorrow, Wolfred would bake. When he went back into the cabin, the girl was exactly where she’d been before. She hadn’t moved a hair. Which also meant that Mackinnon hadn’t touched her. Wolfred put a plate of bread and fish on the dirt floor where she could reach it. She devoured both and gasped for breath. He set a tankard of water near her. She gulped it all down, her throat clucking like a baby’s as she drained the cup. After Mackinnon had eaten, he crawled into his slat-and-bearskin bed, where it was his habit to drink himself to sleep. Wolfred cleaned up the cabin. Then he heated a pail of water and crouched near the girl. He wet a rag and dabbed at her face. As the caked dirt came off, he discovered her features, one by one, and saw that they were very fine. Her lips were small and full. Her eyes hauntingly sweet. Her eyebrows perfectly flared. When her face was uncovered, he stared at her in dismay. She was exquisite. Did Mackinnon know? Gimiikwaadiz, Wolfred whispered. He knew the word for how she looked. Carefully, reaching into the corner of the cabin for what he needed, he mixed mud. He held her chin and spread the muck back onto her face, blotting over the startling line of her brows, the perfect symmetry of her eyes and nose, the devastating curve of her lips. Mackinnon spoke to the girl in her language, and she hid her muddy face. All I did was ask her name, he said, throwing up his hands. She refuses to tell me her name. Give her some work to do, Roberts. I can’t stand that lump in the corner. Wolfred made her help him chop wood. But her movements displayed the fluid grace of her limbs. He showed her how to bake bread. But the fire lit up her face and the heat melted away some of the mud. He reapplied it. When Mackinnon was out, he tried to teach her to write. She learned the alphabet easily. But writing displayed her hand, marvellously formed. Finally—at her suggestion—she went off to set snares and a trapline. She made herself well enough understood. She planned to buy herself back from Mackinnon by selling the furs. He hadn’t paid that much for her. It would not take long, she implied. All this time, because she knew exactly why Wolfred had replaced the grime on her face, she slouched and grimaced, tousled her hair, and smeared her features. She picked up another written letter every day, then words, phrases. She began to sprinkle them in her talk. For a wild savage, she was certainly intelligent, Wolfred thought. Pretty soon she’s going to take my job. Ha-ha. There was nobody to joke with but himself. The daughter of Mink brooded on the endlessly shifting snow. I will make a fire myself, as the stinking chimookoman won’t let me near his fire at night. Then I can pick the lice from my dress and my blanket. His lice will crawl on me again if he does the old stinking chimookoman thing he does. She saw herself lifting the knife from his belt and slipping it between his ribs. The other one, the young one, was kind but had no power. He didn’t understand what the crafty old chimookoman was doing. Her struggles seemed only to give the drooling dog strength, and he knew exactly how to pin her, how to make her helpless. The birds were silent. She had scrubbed her body red with snow. She threw off everything and lay naked in the snow asking to be dead. She tried not to move, but the cold was bitter and she began to suffer intensely. A person from the other world came. The being was pale blue, without definite form. It took care of her, dressed her, tied on her makizinan, blew the lice off, and wrapped her in a new blanket, saying, Call upon me when this happens, and you shall live. Wolfred hacked off a piece of weasel-gnawed moose. He carried it into the cabin and put it in a pot heaped with snow. He built up the fire just right and hung the pot to boil. He had learned from the girl to harvest red-gold berries, withered a bit in winter, which gave the meat a slightly skunky but pleasant flavor. She had taught him how to make tea from leathery swamp leaves. She had shown him rock lichen, edible but bland. The day was half gone. Mashkiig, the girl’s father, walked in, lean and fearsome, with two slinking minions. He glanced at the girl, then looked away. He traded his furs for rum and guns. Mackinnon told him to get drunk far from the trading post. The day he’d killed the girl’s uncles, Mashkiig had also stabbed everyone else in the vicinity. He’d slit Mink’s nose and ears. Now he tried to claim the girl, then to buy her, but Mackinnon wouldn’t take back any of the guns. After Mashkiig left, Mackinnon and Wolfred each took a piss, hauled some wood in, then locked the inside shutters and loaded their guns. About a week later, they heard that he’d killed Mink. The girl put her head down and wept. “You’re still thinking about the maple-bacon funnel cake, aren’t you?”Buy the print » Wolfred was a clerk of greater value than he knew. He cooked well and could make bread from practically nothing. He’d kept his father’s yeast going halfway across North America, and he was always seeking new sources of provender. He was using up the milled flour that Mackinnon had brought to trade. The Indians hadn’t got a taste for it yet. Wolfred had ground wild rice to powder and added it to the stuff they had. Last summer, he had mounded up clay and hollowed it out into an earthen oven. That was where he baked his weekly loaves. As the loaves were browning, Mackinnon came outside. The scent of the bread so moved him, there in the dark of winter, that he opened a keg of wine. They’d had six kegs, and were down to five. Mackinnon had packed the good wine in himself, over innumerable portages. Ordinarily, he partook of the trader’s rum that the voyageurs humped in to supply and resupply the Indians. Now he and Wolfred drank together, sitting on two stumps by the heated oven and a leaping fire. Outside the circle of warmth, the snow squeaked and the stars pulsed in the impenetrable heavens. The girl sat between them, not drinking. She thought her own burdensome thoughts. From time to time, both of the men glanced at her profile in the firelight. Her dirty face was brushed with raw gold. When the wine was drunk, the bread was baked. Reverently, they removed the loaves and put them, hot, inside their coats. The girl opened her blanket to accept a loaf from Wolfred. As he gave it to her, he realized that her dress was torn down the middle. He looked into her eyes and her eyes slid to Mackinnon. Then she ducked her head and held the dress together with her elbow while she bit into the loaf. Inside, they sat on small stumps, around a bigger stump, to eat. The cabin had been built around the large stump so that it could serve as a table. Wolfred looked so searchingly at Mackinnon that the trader finally said, What? Mackinnon had a flaccid bladder belly, crab legs, a snoose-stained beard, pig-mad red eyes, red sprouts of dandered hair, wormish lips, pitchy teeth, breath that knocked you sideways, and nose hairs that dripped snot on and spoiled Wolfred’s perfectly inked numbers. Mackinnon was also a dead shot, and hell with his claw hammer. Wolfred had seen him use it on one of the very minions who’d shadowed Mashkiig that day. He was dangerous. Yet. Wolfred chewed and stared. He was seized with sharp emotion. For the first time in his life, Wolfred began to see the things of which he was capable. Wolfred sorted through the options: They could run away, but Mackinnon would not only pursue them but pay Mashkiig to get to them first. They could stick together at all times so that Wolfred could watch over her, but that would make it obvious that Wolfred knew and they would lose the element of surprise. Xenophon had lain awake in the night, asking himself this question: What age am I waiting for to come to myself? This age, Wolfred thought. Because they had to kill Mackinnon, of course. Really, it was the first thing Wolfred had thought of doing, and the only way. To feel better about it, however, he had examined all the options. How to do it? Shooting him was out. There might be justice. Killing him by axe, hatchet, knife, or rock, or tying him up and stuffing him under the ice were also risky that way. As he lay in the faltering dark imagining each scenario, Wolfred remembered how he’d walked the woods with her. She knew everything there was to eat in the woods. She probably knew everything not to eat as well. She probably knew poisons. Alone with her the next day, he saw that she’d managed to sew her dress together with a length of sinew. He pointed to the dress, pointed in the general direction of Mackinnon, then proceeded to mime out picking something, cooking it, Mackinnon eating it, holding his belly and pitching over dead. It made her laugh behind her hand. He convinced her that it was not a joke and she began to wash her hands in the air, biting her lip, darting glances all around, as though even the needles on the pines knew what they were planning. Then she signalled him to follow. She searched the woods until she found a stand of oaks, then put a cloth on her hand and plunged it into the snow near a cracked-off stump, rotted down to almost nothing. From beneath the snow she pulled out some dark-gray strands that might once have been mushrooms. That night Wolfred used the breast meat of six partridges, the tenders of three rabbits, wild onions, a shrivelled blue potato, and the girl’s offering to make a highly salted and strongly flavored stew. He unplugged a keg of high wine, and made sure that Mackinnon drained it half down before he ate. The stew did not seem to affect him. They all went to their corners, and Mackinnon kept on drinking the way he usually did until the fire burned out. In the middle of the night, his thrashing, grunting, and high squeals of pain woke them. Wolfred lit a lantern. Mackinnon’s entire head had turned purple and had swollen to a grotesque size. His eyes had vanished in the bloated flesh. His tongue, a mottled fish, bulged from what must have been his mouth. He seemed to be trying to throw himself out of his body. He cast himself violently at the log walls, into the fireplace, upon the mounds of furs and blankets, rattling guns off their wooden hooks. Ammunition, ribbons, and hawksbells rained off the shelves. His belly popped from his vest, round and hard as a boulder. His hands and feet filled like bladders. Wolfred had never witnessed anything remotely as terrifying, but he had the presence of mind not to club Mackinnon or in any way molest his monstrous presence. As for the girl, she seemed pleased at his condition, though she did not smile. Trying to disregard the chaotic death occurring to his left, now to his right, now underfoot, Wolfred prepared to leave. He grabbed snowshoes and two packs, moving clumsily. In the packs he put two fire steels, ammunition, bannocks he had made in advance. He doubled up two blankets and another to cut for leggings, and outfitted himself and the girl with four knives apiece. He took two guns, wadding, and a large flask of gunpowder. He took salt, tobacco, Mackinnon’s precious coffee, and one of the remaining kegs of wine. He did not take overmuch coin, though he knew which hollowed log hid the trader’s tiny stash. Mackinnon’s puffed mitts of hands fretted at his clothing and the threads burst. As Wolfred and the girl slipped out, they could hear him fighting the poison, his breath coming in sonorous gasps. He could barely draw air past his swelled tongue into his gigantic purpled head. Yet he managed to call feebly out to them, My children! Why are you leaving me? From the other side of the door they could hear his legs drumming on the packed earth floor. They could hear his fat paws wildly pattering for water on the empty wooden bucket. On snowshoes of ash wood and sinew, Wolfred and the girl made their way south. They would be easy to follow. Wolfred’s story was that they’d decided to travel toward Grand Portage for help. They had left Mackinnon ill in the cabin with plenty of supplies. If they got lost, wandered, found themselves even farther south, chances were nobody would know or care who Mackinnon was. And so they trekked, making good time, and set up their camp at night. The girl tested the currents of the air with her face and hands, then showed Wolfred where to build a lean-to, how to place it just so, how to find dry wood in snow, snapping dead branches out of trees, and where to pile it so that they could easily keep the fire going all night and direct its heat their way. They slept peacefully, curled in their separate blankets, and woke to the wintertime scolding of chickadees. The girl tuned up the fire, they ate, and were back on their way south when suddenly they heard the awful gasping voice of Mackinnon behind them. They could hear him blundering toward them, cracking twigs, calling out to them, Wait, my children, wait a moment, do not abandon me! They started forward in terror. Soon a dog drew near them, one of the trading post’s pathetic curs; it ran alongside them, bounding effortfully through the snow. At first they thought that Mackinnon had sent it to find them, but then the girl stopped and looked hard at the dog. It whined to her. She nodded and pointed the way through the trees to a frozen river, where they would move more quickly. On the river ice they slid along with a dreamlike velocity. The girl gave the dog a piece of bannock from her pocket, and that night, when they made camp, she set her snares out all around them. She built their fire and the lean-to so that they had to pass through a narrow space between two trees. Here, too, she set a snare. Its loop was large enough for a man’s head, even a horribly swollen one. They fed themselves and the dog, and slept with their knives out, packs and snowshoes close by. Near morning, when the fire was down to coals, Wolfred woke. He heard Mackinnon’s rasping breath very close. The dog barked. The girl got up and signalled that Wolfred should fasten on his snowshoes and gather their packs and blankets. As the light came up, Wolfred saw that the sinew snare set for Mackinnon was jigging, pulled tight. The dog worried and tore at some invisible shape. The girl showed Wolfred how to climb over the lean-to another way, and made him understand that he should check the snares she’d set, retrieve anything they’d caught, and not forget to remove the sinews so that she could reset them at their next camp. Mackinnon’s breathing resounded through the clearing around the fire. As Wolfred left, he saw that the girl was preparing a stick with pine pitch and birch bark. He saw her thrust it at the air again and again. There were muffled grunts of pain. Wolfred was so frightened that he had trouble finding all the snares, and he had to cut the sinew that had choked a frozen rabbit. Eventually, the girl joined him and they slid back down to the river with the dog. Behind them, unearthly caterwauls began. To Wolfred’s relief, the girl smiled and skimmed forward, calm, full of confidence. Though she was still a child. “Who here likes impressions?”Buy the print » Wolfred asked the girl to tell him her name. He asked in words, he asked in signs, but she wouldn’t speak. Each time they stopped, he asked. But though she smiled at him, and understood exactly what he wanted, she wouldn’t answer. She looked into the distance. The next morning, after they had slept soundly, she knelt near the fire to blow it back to life. All of a sudden, she went still and stared into the trees. She jutted her chin forward, then pulled back her hair and narrowed her eyes. Wolfred followed her gaze and saw it, too. Mackinnon’s head, rolling laboriously over the snow, its hair on fire, flames cheerfully flickering. Sometimes it banged into a tree and whimpered. Sometimes it propelled itself along with its tongue, its slight stump of neck, or its comically paddling ears. Sometimes it whizzed along for a few feet, then quit, sobbing in frustration at its awkward, interminable progress. Fighting, outwitting, burning, even leaving food behind for the head to gobble, just to slow it down, the girl, Wolfred, and the dog travelled. They wore out their snowshoes, and the girl repaired them. Their moccasins shredded. She layered the bottoms with skin and lined them with rabbit fur. Every time they tried to rest, the head would appear, bawling at night, fiery at dawn. So they moved on and on, until, at last, starved and frozen, they gave out. The small bark hut took most of a day to bind together. As they prepared to sleep, Wolfred arranged a log on the fire and then fell back as if struck. The simple action had dizzied him. His strength had flowed right out through his fingers, into the fire. The fire now sank quickly from his sight, as if over some invisible cliff. He began to shiver, hard, and then a black wall fell. He was confined in a temple of branching halls. All that night he groped his way through narrow passages, along doorless walls. He crept around corners, stayed low. Standing was impossible, even in his dreams. When he opened his eyes at first light, he saw that the vague dome of the hut was spinning so savagely that it blurred and sickened him. He did not dare to open his eyes again that day, but lay as still as possible, lifting his head only to sip the water the girl dripped between his lips from a piece of folded bark. He told her to leave him behind. She pretended not to understand him. All day she cared for him, hauling wood, boiling broth, keeping him warm. That night the dog growled ferociously at the door, and Wolfred opened one eye briefly to see infinitely duplicated images of the girl heating the blade of the axe red hot and gripping the handle with rags. He felt her slip out the door, and then there began a great babble of howling, cursing, shrieking, desperate groaning and thumping, as if trees were being felled. This went on all night. At first light, he sensed that she’d crept inside again. He felt the warmth and weight of her curled against his back, smelled the singed fur of the dog or maybe her hair. Hours into the day, she woke, and he heard her tuning a drum in the warmth of the fire. Surprised, he asked her, in Ojibwe, how she’d got the drum. It flew to me, she told him. This drum belonged to my mother. With this drum, she brought people to life. He must have heard wrong, or misunderstood. Drums cannot fly. He was not dead. Or was he? The world behind his closed eyes was ever stranger. From the many-roomed black temple, he had stepped into a universe of fractured patterns. There was no relief from their implacable mathematics. Designs formed and re-formed. Hard-edged triangles joined and split in an endless geometry. If this was death, it was visually exhausting. Only when she started drumming did the patterns gradually lose their intensity. Their movement diminished as she sang in an off-key, high-pitched, nasal whine that rose and fell in calming repetition. The drum corrected some interior rhythm, a delicious relaxation painted his thoughts, and he slept. Again, that night, he heard the battle outside, anguished, desperate. Again, at first light, he felt her curl against him and smelled the scorched dog. Again, when she woke, she tuned and beat the drum. The same song transported him. He put his hand to his head. She’d cut up her blanket, crowned him with a warm woollen turban. That night, he opened his eyes and saw the world rock to a halt. Joyously, he whispered, I am back. I have returned. You shall go on one more journey with me, she said, smiling, and began to sing. Her song lulled and relaxed him so that when he stepped out of his body he was not afraid to lift off the ground alongside her. They travelled into vast air. Over the dense woods, they flew so fast that no cold could reach them. Below them, fires burned, a village only two days’ walk from their hut. Satisfied, she turned them back and Wolfred drifted down into the body that he would not leave again until he had completed half a century of bone-breaking work. Two days later, they left the deep wilderness and entered a town. Ojibwe bark houses, a hundred or more, were set up along the lakeshore. On a street of beaten snow, several wooden houses were neatly rooted in an incongruous row. They were so like the houses that Wolfred had left behind out East that, for a disoriented moment, he believed they had traversed the Great Lakes. He knocked at the door of the largest house. Not until he had introduced himself in English did the young woman who answered recognize him as a white man. She and her husband, missionaries, brought the pair into a warm kitchen. They were given water and rags to wash with, and then a tasteless porridge of boiled wild rice. They were allowed to sleep with blankets, on the floor behind the woodstove. The dog, left outside, sniffed the missionaries’ dog and followed it to the barn, where the two coupled in the steam of the cow’s great body. The next morning, speaking earnestly to the girl, whose clean face was too beautiful to look at, Wolfred asked if she would marry him. When you grow up, he said. She smiled and nodded. Again, he asked her name. She laughed, not wanting him to own her, and drew a flower. The missionary was sending a few young Ojibwe to a Presbyterian boarding school, in Michigan, that was for Indians only, and he offered to send the girl there, too, if she wanted to become educated. She agreed to do it. At the school, everything was taken from her. Losing her mother’s drum was like losing Mink all over again. At night, she asked the drum to fly back to her again. But there was no answer. She soon learned how to fall asleep. Or let the part of myself they call hateful fall asleep, she thought. But that was all of herself. Her whole being was Anishinaabe. She was Illusion. She was Mirage. Ombanitemagad. Or what they called her now—Indian. As in, Do not speak Indian, when she had been speaking her own language. It was hard to divide off parts of herself and let them go. At night, she flew up through the ceiling and soared as she had been taught. She stored pieces of her being in the tops of the trees. She’d retrieve them later, when the bells stopped. But the bells would never stop. There were so many bells. Her head ached, at first, because of the bells. My thoughts are all tangled up, she said out loud to herself, inbiimiskwendam. However, there was very little time to consider what was happening. The other children smelled like old people. Soon she did, too. Her woollen dress and corset pinched, and the woollen underwear made her itch like mad. Her feet were shot through with pain, and stank from sweating in hard leather. Her hands chapped. She was always cold, but she was already used to that. The food was usually salt pork and cabbage, which cooked foul and turned the dormitory rank with farts, as did the milk they were forced to drink. But no matter how raw, or rotten, or strange, she had to eat, so she got used to it. It was hard to understand the teachers or say what she needed in their language, but she learned. The crying up and down the rows of beds at night kept her awake, but soon she cried and farted herself to sleep with everyone else. She missed her mother, even though Mink had sold her. She missed Wolfred, the only person left for her. She kept his finely written letters. When she was weak or tired, she read them over. That he called her Flower made her uneasy. Girls were not named for flowers, as flowers died so quickly. Girls were named for deathless things—forms of light, forms of clouds, shapes of stars, that which appears and disappears like an island on the horizon. Sometimes the school seemed like a dream that could not be true, and she fell asleep hoping to wake in another world. She never got used to the bells, but she got used to other children coming and going. They died of measles, scarlet fever, flu, diphtheria, tuberculosis, and other diseases that did not have a name. But she was already accustomed to everybody around her dying. Once, she got a fever and thought that she would also die. But in the night her pale-blue spirit came, sat on the bed, spoke to her kindly, and told her that she would live. Nobody got drunk. Nobody slashed her mother’s face and nose, ruining her. Nobody took a knife and stabbed an uncle who held her foot and died as the blood gushed from his mouth. Another good thing she thought of while the other children wept was that the journey to the school had been arduous and far. Much too far for a head to roll.

Carl Hirsch didn’t do holiday parties. At least, not correctly. All the so-called people, wind streaming from their faces. Fleshy machines spewing pollution, fucking up the environment. If he squinted, the celebrating bodies of his co-workers very nearly blistered into molecules, shining with color. Too often the whole of it—people, places, and things—looked to scatter. Everyone on the verge of turning to soup. So what if there was no precedent for a full-scale human melt, bodies reduced to liquid pouring from a window? You could still worry about it. Sometimes you had to. Tonight’s party was in one of those long, skinny city apartments you’re supposed to verbally fellate with praise. It was like walking into a tiny, dismal doghouse, a real doghouse, and then kissing the furred ass of the dog who lived there, who was super annoyed to have you clogging up his tiny room. You were allowed to stay as long as you kept using your tongue. Hopefully, this doghouse had sick drinks. And free money. And those soft bones in sauce they sometimes served at company parties. Even if he was only permitted to sniff them, because of his feeding regimen. “The light, the space, my God!” Carl found himself saying to the small, perfectly dressed host, who stood on the landing. The host greeted Carl with alarm. Carl reached up, too late, to cover his face. He didn’t want to be a burden—at least, not to just anyone. And yet, fuck this guy. Didn’t Emily Post have a whole chapter on hiding all reaction to astonishing creatures who appeared at your door? Shutting your little face down so as not to reveal the horror and disgust you might really feel? To the host, Carl said, grinning far too hard, “Just show me to my rooms and I’ll get out of everyone’s way. Jones is on his way up with my luggage. This is going to be such a fun year, roommate!” The host didn’t hear him, missed the joke. He was already looking over Carl’s shoulder to where people were crowding up the narrow staircase, trying to push their way inside. Because heaven. Because drinks. Because loneliness and flesh pleasure. Because the invite said, “Levitate, my friends! Let us see the soles of your feet!” Because Mayflower, where they all worked, was pure shithouse. The future was ripe for sexual conquest, and they were busy greasing up their parts. Carl knew he wasn’t the type to get fondled when he passed out. Mostly it was because of his face, thanks to his job. Rough on the eyes, tough to the touch. Scratchproof, though, which was a bonus. Particularly if some long-shot apocalypse reared up and he had to go face first into the bramble or some such. For now, partygoers pressing in behind him, he could do nothing but raise his arms and surf forward into the mob, hoping with all his might that the wave would carry him, safe and sound, back home to his bed. In some ways, it was inevitable that Carl, a few nights later, would take a picture of his balls and send it to the Mayflower e-mail list. After a hot bath, he propped up his phone in the dank zone and captured the crag and the woof, the topographical crimson scorch. He got the shot, pressed “share,” and released the picture into the ether. It felt all right. A certain unburdening. Maybe even like postcoital clarity, chaste and lonely as it was. Afterward, he was tempted to stand at his apartment window and listen through the glass, into the pulse of the evening, as his message landed at key e-mail terminals throughout the metropolis. If you counted from the beginning, going back to the supposedly sunny morning when Carl was born, this was day ten thousand seven hundred and something of his tremendously joyful stretch of time, his project aboveground. To hear his mother tell it, because certain mothers break into story when you enter their homes, the birds were in ecstasy the day he was born, squawking over the hospital. The air was so crisp and cool that day, his mother would add, that you felt hugged by the wind. Her phrase. When little Carl was born, the whole neighborhood, per his mother, held its breath. Someone new is among us. Someone special. It was a revisionist birth narrative, likely concocted when it struck Carl’s mother, poor thing, that her son was just another piercingly boring need machine, underperforming and overwhelming, programmed to crave so much from her that she would soon forget her interests and reëngineer her whole self in order to supply the mothering that would keep her child, at the very least, out of jail, out of a coffin, and out of the sex-change doctor’s office. At which point she would subtly punish him with nearly imperceptible indifference and ambivalence. Parenting! As far as motives go, his mother had a pretty good one for her wholesale, self-serving fictionalization of Carl’s birth, and he forgave her, not that she ever asked him to, for glorifying his unremarkable début. In his twenties, just before his mother died, when she was listless and storied out, staring through a different hospital window as if surveying the land for her own burial, Carl finally Googled the weather on the day of his birth. And, well, lookee there: rain, rain, rain, ash, fire, murder, murder, rain. A godless Tuesday. Unprecedented torrents flooding down from the north. Dirt and mud and broken trees and houses split in half. Sunshine, maybe, but not in his part of the world. And birds? The Internet had little to say on the matter. As it turned out, Carl’s photo back-fired. The folks at work who opened his attachment—the upper-level creatives at Mayflower as well as the engineers holed up in the silo in Albuquerque—mistook it for an image of Carl’s pitiful neck. Or maybe a scalded bit of acreage under his arm. In other words, no one seemed to see anything uniquely scrotal in the photo. Just grim, if understandable, symptom documentation from a man who was perhaps Mayflower’s most martyred employee. Slash medical subject. Slash guinea pig. Slash hero. Slash fool. Carl the Boiled, as he had started to think of himself. Taking one for the team. At work the next day, expecting to be shunned and sort of figuratively barfed on, maybe swept into the farewell room, where underachievers got hand-stabbed by Kipler, the C.E.O., Carl instead collected a few drive-by hugs. He was heavily touched, right on the body, by people he’d hardly even met. A kind of unprecedented love was brought to bear all over his person. “Oh, my gosh,” Kora, from Nutrients, said, holding him at arm’s length and staring wildly just above his head. She was always the one putting the needle in and sometimes forgetting to take it out. “Carl? Honey?” “I’m O.K.,” Carl whispered, suddenly shy. “I know!” Kora said. “You are! You will be! You are so brave. I can’t believe you are being so open about what this is doing to you. It serves them right.” She shook her fist. Kora the Explorer. He wouldn’t think of her that way anymore. He actually appreciated her kindness, if misdirected. If incorrect. Did it matter? She squeezed his waist, and he felt himself pee a little. His bladder seemed to belong to someone else entirely. Later in the morning, an older man ducked into Carl’s cubicle, a man who seemed to have been designed, by experts, to embody sorrow and regret. He shook his head with deep, theatrical empathy. His name was maybe Murray. Maury? Perhaps it was Larry. He was a tech. He performed overnight adjustments to the computer displays that were slowly roasting Carl’s face, in the service of the greater good. Money piles for Mayflower. Loss of bodily function for Carl. “I’m just thinking about you and feeling for you,” the man said to Carl, stooped in a kind of prayer bow. “And knowing that there’s no way I can really know, I mean, I can’t . . .” He paused. “What you’re going through. None of us can.” “Everything we can’t know,” Carl said, shaking his head as cheerfully as he could. “Maybe it’s time to cry uncle. Mysteries one, us nothing. We lose!” The man dipped his head again, pressed his hands together. “Anyway, it’s what we signed up for, right?” Carl said, trying and failing to picture the exact moment when he’d agreed to take part in the experiment. Had it ever happened? He couldn’t remember the last time he’d written his name, said yes, nodded his head, assented. Maybe by simply staying alive he implied his agreement and coöperation? Simply by walking the halls at Mayflower, and not crawling into a hole, he was saying, Yes, yes, please test your equipment on me. Especially the equipment that burns. I would be most pleased if you would. How sweet of this man to visit and thank Carl for his service. The old Carl would have smiled and thanked him, but his thanking utensil, connected inexorably to his face, was broken. He had the paralyzed head of a mascot. What he needed now, in order to engage in human congress, was emoticons on Popsicle sticks that he could wave around, lest everyone start to think that he was dead on the inside, too. Boiled Carl, alpha tester in this freak show, wasn’t exactly sure how the whole U.V. feeding thing had even come about. Why would Mayflower’s cold commanders, motherfuckers extraordinaire, reveal their true road map to him, anyway? He’d joined Mayflower’s wearables team five years back and had been whiteboarding applications that tracked emotions, or tried to, so that the world’s feelings could finally get accurately logged. And mined. And then probably ransomed back to the people who had the feelings in the first place. Using the data they collected, Carl’s team had been able to match users’ emotion narratives—the plotted vectors of what they felt over the course of days and weeks and years—with those of other users. Maybe even in their own apartment building. Certainly in their neighborhood. Unless they lived in the middle of fucking nowhere. Or unless their feeling vectors were highly unusual. Carl’s team proposed a kind of mood pairing. Who else is bummed out? Who doesn’t give a shit? Who feels pretty good today, maybe borderline ecstatic, even though something bad happened in Angola? Who’s lost the taste for staying out late, wants to be alone but is lonely anyway? Who eats his daily caloric value in one sitting at 3 a.m. and has an unfun reaction to that? This wouldn’t be just a dating service, even though, ka-ching, hello! Get paid, hashtag gritty times! They were pretty sure they were onto something. Carl thought that, with enough users shooting their feelings into the cloud, Mayflower would be sitting on a gold mine of data. It was the ultimate privacy grab, better even than a blood sample from every living person on the planet. Which the rumor sites also had Mayflower pursuing. But management smelled too much choice. The whole thing stank of opt out. Self-knowledge was for the dead, they said. People don’t like themselves enough to have to deal with other people with feelings so similar to their own. It makes them feel less special. A product shouldn’t be trying to tell the truth so aggressively. That was a turnoff. Besides, the feeling sensors weren’t where they should be, technology-wise, and only young people would want to wear the neck collars that Carl was proposing. Management pulled the kill switch. Management being Kipler, Kipler, Kipler, and Kipler, depending on his mood. Depending on his sweater. Creative staged charrettes. Disruption was the watchword. Carl and his team were pressured to lift their legs and pee-shame the status quo. For a cash-yielding invention to work, for it to leak gold pudding and really destroy the economy, in Mayflower’s favor, maybe even change the meaning of money, Kipler once said, it had to look inevitable, ridiculously obvious in hindsight. They all kept coming back to food. What a problem it was. And not just because there was so little of it left hiding on the planet. Carl was there when Kipler first brought the life hackers into the charrette. Brutal, loud, beautiful, aspirationally immortal. Just a bunch of ageless kid-looking creatures who were like Version 2.0 people. How old were they, really? Eleven? Kipler called them Mayflower’s future. Early adopters of every health trend, enthusiasts of untested medical protocols. They micro-fasted, binged on superfoods, fussed over their own blood tests, which they posted cockily on the longevity message boards. Carl once saw them tearing down a hallway, something clear and greasy on their upper lips. They seemed deranged. Soon the life hackers were obsessed with a service called Jug. Every morning, a jug was delivered to your cubicle. It was all you needed for the day. Nutritionally bozo. Freakishly optimized, and they could load your meds into it, just to keep all your material input in one receptacle. Sometimes the jug held a thick lotion, more of a cream than a drink. Other times it was slippery and clear, with a foamy head. It depended on your bloodwork. As you graduated through jugs, the color and the quality of the liquid changed, responding to feedback. When you finished a jug, you spat your last sip back into the bottle, to be analyzed before the next day’s potion was brewed. Or supposedly. The life hackers had brought their jugs to the charrette one day and swigged from them, burping a grassy steam. The legend that developed is that Kipler smashed some jugs that day, swung one against his own head, grinning madly. Carl would love to have seen that. Some of the goo in those bottles looked as if it couldn’t even spill. It would just hang in the air like a cloud. He pictured Kipler cream-soaked, coated in white foam. What did happen is that Kipler said that the startup that had invented Jug had missed the whole point. They were drawing your attention to your food, giving you a heavy accessory, isolating you socially, et cetera—he went on for like ten minutes of scathing criticism. Kipler destroyed the premise, the execution, the future of this product, and the life hackers, poor guys, seemed to wither at the table. “Get rid of the jug,” Kipler finally said. “Get rid of the liquid. Get rid of everything. What’s left?” No one answered. Kipler smiled. “Exactly,” he said. “Nothing. There’s nothing left.” He gestured into empty space, then pointed at the overhead fixture. “We’re all sitting here, soaking in light. We could have been eating this whole time.” Kipler was pretty quiet after that, and everybody was freaked out, looking up into the light, squinting. Mayflower Systems regularly bought and destroyed small companies, mostly to crush progress. And maybe also simply to frighten the universe and increase world sadness? One of the patent portfolios that had come online at around that time involved grow lights. Using light as a delivery system for nutrients, not just for plants but for animals. A light bulb went off, and a U.V. healing wand for sick animals became, at Mayflower, something utterly else and freaking wonderful. A nutrient-delivery system for the skin, for people skin. A goddam human grow light, as Kipler put it, though he thought the word “human” sounded too technical. The way skin makes Vitamin D from sunlight. Except this would be other vitamins, too, and micronutrients. And then, one day, the three amigos: fat, protein, and carbohydrates, who usually got inside us only through flesh eating and the like. The marketing hook was that meals were obsolete. Meals were a headache and a hassle. Meals were disgusting. Because of sauce. Because of stench. In the future, Kipler would yell, everyone would eat by accident, while doing other things. While working! Who would volunteer? Who would saddle up and taste the greatness? Who was stupid? Who had nothing to lose? Who lacked a family to mourn him should things go blue? Who wanted to be a hero? Who could withstand tremendous levels of pain without blacking out? Who could abide a chronic, deep itch under the skin that scratching merely exacerbated? Those, in fact, were not the criteria. None of them. They blood-tested Creative and looked for subjects with gross nutritional deficits. In other words, people who ate like shit and had the blood numbers of a gremlin. The first goal was to see if the grow light could move the needle, boost a dude’s Vitamin A or whatnot. Actually satiate. And not, you know, hasten to expire. And then luminous efficacy would be stretched. Light-form carbohydrate spectrum, rays of protein. Yup. Radical color temps and other PAR value mods to the spectrum. The talk got geeky. If all went well, they’d pilot a dark strobe, something like a noise gate that regulated the feed? Just pulse darkness so as not to turn the poor subject into some kind of demon, twitching under a heat lamp. Carl’s bloodwork deemed him the most deviant, healthwise, and the applause he got, a king’s greeting, which must have been cheers of relief, sort of decided the thing. It was Carl who’d be going under the light. All you can eat. Everyone hollered to give it up for Carl and then everyone sort of did, vocally. The entire room, as if they’d planned it, yelled, “Bon appétit, Carl!” Flashlights were clicked on, and these flannel-shirted semi-strangers gathered around him, shining their things in his face, as a kind of joke, Carl guessed, but it was sickening a little. Mayflower put Carl on a detox. Not Jug. Just some potions cooked up in the cafeteria, sometimes administered to him in the men’s room, when privacy was called for. Bone-broth jello. Quite a lot of citrus. Cold coffee shot into his dark parts. A vitamin lotion smeared onto his newly shaved head, because raw skin says yes, one of the nutrient nurses explained. Your pores just gape open. Oxygen, she explained, was richer when emulsified into a cream. Carl felt shaky, poisoned in a way he didn’t quite mind, and when the day came he was ready. The first time he ate the light, sitting at his desk starving his ass off, staring at his laptop screen, it felt like getting slapped. A lot. That was the nutrient penetration, they explained. Like shotgun pellets. To Carl, it felt as if someone had pinned him to the floor and was just pimp-slapping him into submission. Carl asked for goggles. His eyes hurt. His feet shrank and weakened. By the end of the first week his tongue clogged his mouth. Enough to foul his speech and make him sound like an animal. And he suffered from a bottomless, gnawing hunger. Maybe because he was getting only enough nutrition, at that point, to sustain a cricket. It was hard, hard, hard to convert fat into light. The body, Carl’s body, wanted good fats, bad fats, a salt lick, a fat friend. His cravings went berserk. He dreamed of fat, thought of eating parts of himself. The tech for the fat conversion was pretty crude. Understatement. Carl pictured Mme. Blavatsky at a loom. How do you speed up fat, make it invisible, but also really fast, really powerful? You could do it, but badly, and this sort of light just balls-out hurt going in. Hurt and burned. Or the reverse. The flesh was chilled by it, for some reason, and there could be rot. Of the skin. There were some glitches. Display burnout, necrosis. The paint on the cubicle wall behind Carl’s head, which collected the light when he wasn’t sitting there, bubbled up and peeled. There were side effects. Including the dark hardening of Carl’s face. They called it “blizzard face.” A team was already at work on a grow-light recovery lotion to market as a solution to the problem they’d created. “Must everything with you be a landmark decision?”Buy the print » Carl felt like an astronaut, a child, a corpse. He asked the obvious questions. Why not some other patch of skin? Something less, maybe, facial? But Kipler was adamant. The face was already getting bathed in light all fucking day by people looking at their computers and phones. “All day! Take what’s there and body-slam it!” he shouted. That was the entire point. “We use the gestural habits that are already in place. What’s already happening! There’s nothing new to learn, nothing to do, nothing to think, nothing to feel. Victory! Do you not see that? Get out of my house if you don’t see that. People don’t want to think about eating. We are giving them a gift. The invention is hidden. It’s nothing! Think nothing.” During an early charrette, after the experiment began, a tech ran in yelling about an update to the display, some U.V. dilation they’d pulled off to widen the protein band, muscling it into something called gray light. They’d crowded one more amino acid onto the spectrum, apparently. “Carl,” the tech said, bowing. “Your presence is humbly requested in Albuquerque. We’ve freaking iterated the shit out of this display. It’s like pure food. We cooled the bitch right down. You’re going to feast, my man. Bring your goggles.” And then, in a fight announcer’s voice, the tech boomed, “Let’s get ready for Pro-Tein!” High fives all around. Carl stood up and shadowboxed, ducking and weaving, but the effort left him dizzy and breathless. He sat back down. When he returned from Albuquerque, he was hungrier than ever. He had a potbelly. A sore had formed on his chin. He’d enjoyed a small boost in his folate level. In iron. Magnesium. But he was still losing muscle mass, and he felt a tight bulge in one of his eyes. The medics kept waving him through, chortling about miracles. The project was considered a success. Carl was a great explorer. They pushed him in a wheelchair down hallways, just to keep his energy up. Sometimes he slept through a feed, waking up famished with a hot, tight face. Carl dreamed of the sort of hood used for falcons. Someone could push the shrouded man around and everybody would whisper, “That’s Carl. Look at Carl. Oh, my God, there he is.” “I want what he’s having,” Carl would say to himself, in a voice he could no longer recognize. When Carl finally sent his crotch shot out into the world, the testing had been going on for endless hungry, scorched weeks. The computer displays were fucking hot, and for a while, before the hardening, Carl rashed up. His skin tightened, his face itched, and something behind his face, the fascia, they called it, seemed to kind of break up. Which caused a kind of feature slide. He submitted to daily bloodwork. They gave him some drug called Shitazine, or that wasn’t exactly what it was called, which turned him totally off mouth food. So they could do a full nutritional assay. On weekends, ravenous and puckered, he got a smoothie, jacked with protein, just to keep him off life support. Monday mornings they chelated him, or something that sounded like that, to zero out his nutritional stats, so that he could sizzle-fry in front of the panels all week and they could clock what was coming in. If he thought about it, having survived the genital share, there wasn’t a simple answer to why he’d sent the picture. But there wasn’t a complicated answer, either. To Carl himself, it seemed both obvious and mysterious, inevitable and random. He could embrace nearly any interpretation. But since no one appeared to have seen it for what it was, trying to understand it suddenly felt bizarre. He was embarrassed that he’d done it and also disappointed that he hadn’t done it well. He was ashamed and indifferent. Disturbed and content. But most of all his body was empty and dry, and he was powerfully, powerfully hungry. Carl was due at the lab on Thursdays, but this week they called him in early. “You are technically malnourished,” the doctor told him, smiling. “But here’s the thing. So are most people, and they actually eat food. Being malnourished is not per se a concern of ours. You’ve lost a few pounds—well, more than that—but that could be attributed to stress at work. And, anyway, ideal body weight? Still not quite there. So O.K. Pretty much. Muscle mass, sure. And your fingernails are brittle, which, of course. Well. What’s important, what’s kind of amazing, is that you’re not starving. Your magnesium levels are ridiculous. I mean, just a joke, in terms of not eating at all. This isn’t possible. What we’re doing. It’s not possible!” “O.K.,” Carl said. “I mean, you’re hardly in ketosis here!” the doctor shouted, waving his clipboard. Carl wanted to enjoy this news. Some carbs were flowing in. Whoopee. He was not technically dead. He looked at the two-way mirror, wondering who was back there. Kipler, no doubt, every single version of him. He had a lot riding on Carl. He needed this to work. Why was he hiding? Carl wondered. Afraid of a man whose face has died? Then Carl did that thing he’d seen on TV where the suspect in the interrogation room gets up and confronts the two-way mirror. Pounds on it to call out the lurkers standing in judgment, deciding his future. Come on out, and all that. What are you afraid of? Except Carl did it sort of mildly. It was hard to walk. He tottered over to the glass, cupped his hands against it. He didn’t want to break anything. Just a few taps on the glass. Hello? he thought. Hello? Did he really need to say it out loud? How much of this shit needed to be spelled out? “Uh, what are you doing?” the doctor asked. To answer that in detail, Carl would have had to wave a pretty complicated set of emoticons. Desperation, suspicion, apology, and, hovering over all the others, exhaustion. Just a yellow ball of tired face. Not yawning, though. Not that kind of tired. “Tired face, tired face,” Carl said to the doctor. “Just fucking tired face.” “There’s nothing back there,” the doctor said. “It’s a closet. I’ll show you.” Carl waved him away. He apologized. He was being paranoid, he explained. It’s just that he was always so hungry, and it wasn’t pain so much as tremendous pressure flushing through him. “It’s like someone keeps pouring hot water inside me. Inside my whole body. I’m getting rinsed out by very hot water. Agony face. Face for I don’t know how much longer I can do this.” The doctor looked at him but made no note. “I’m just being foolish,” Carl said. “You know me.” The doctor nodded. They hardly knew each other at all. Carl ducked out and resumed his session at his desk. The light from his computer today was cool, almost soothing. Maybe they’d iterated a healing blue ray. Maybe this would all start feeling better. To kill time, he fired up a lost-person Web site and put in his own name. The tracking on these things was pretty poor. You could register, supposedly, and get better data. Live tracking was promised. Was it real? Could he pay the money and then see, in digital scribble, the path he’d been taking these past few months? Would the bird’s-eye view reveal something new? Because he’d been through it on the ground, in person, and even he couldn’t be sure. The problem was that there were too many Carl Hirsches to choose from. Maybe thirty in Carl’s region alone. You could pick only one at a time, then pay your money for the reveal. But behind each clickable Carl Hirsch was the same picture, the only extant picture of a Carl Hirsch anywhere, apparently. The picture looked a good deal like Carl’s own father, dead a long time now, who never lived in this area. Never even visited, as far as Carl knew. Was it really him? The picture was from that era when subjects did not look at the camera, so here was someone who looked very much like his dad, from so long ago, staring into the distance, at something behind Carl that he couldn’t see. No matter how he jogged his head, he could not quite get those eyes to look at him. The rest of the week went O.K. The sympathy dried up, but all seemed well. Carl fried at his desk, sipped distilled water. His guards didn’t seem to be minding him so carefully, and Kora hadn’t come by to stick him with Shitazine, so he grabbed a scone at one point, and it burst into powder in his mouth. He fell to the ground coughing, a cloud of crumbs spraying everywhere, but no one at Mayflower particularly minded him. They knew his life was hell. In the coatroom as Carl was leaving that Friday, Kipler pulled him aside. Out in the open, in front of the rush-hour crowd of employees, who pretended that their boss wasn’t standing right there, huddled up with Blizzard Face himself. “So what’s with the crotch shot?” “What?” “Why did you send a picture of your testicles to so many strangers? People were revolted and confused. And over e-mail. The least secure form of communication ever devised, including whatever the apes used.” “You knew?” “A scrotum isn’t some rare species, nor does any living person have a neck that fucked up. We know what your symptoms are. We caused them. I’ve probably seen forty unique pairs of balls. Just a round number. Not all of them up close, but I know what they look like.” “I’m sorry,” Carl said. “So are we. You’re out. It breaks your nondisclosure. Honestly, even if it doesn’t, it breaks something. Something is wrong. Your data is mud.” “I agree,” Carl said. “Go have a sandwich, already. You’re off the feed. We neutralized your panels a few days ago from a kill switch in Albuquerque.” “I was going to say,” Carl said. “Something seemed like an improvement.” “The alpha unit wasn’t friendly. We know that. Sorry for, you know. Mostly it was proof of concept. And guess what. Proof achieved. Through the motherfucking roof. Maybe your numbers weren’t good, but they were numbers. You fed. Badly, and with little retention. But you fed. We’re moving to beta. The life hackers are going to strap in. This thing will make it to market. I’m sorry you can’t take the ride with us.” “So am I fired?” “Don’t push your luck. The N.D.A. still stands, for like three lifetimes. Your children’s children, not that offspring are a likely outcome for you, can’t even whisper it to each other. I’ll be dead myself, but I’ll leave instructions that they be slapped across the room and out a window if that happens. Slapped right the fuck off the planet. So nary a whisper. Not that you’re having kids. We find that it’s easiest for you to keep quiet about all this if you, you know, don’t even remember it. That way it’s not a secret you’re keeping. You don’t even know about it yourself. Which is very nearly true. That’s the argument from our side. Not even the argument, just the language. It never happened.” “Thanks,” Carl said. “I love you, man,” Kipler said. He closed in on Carl, wrapped him in his arms. “What a bullet you took for us,” he whispered. “A huge bullet. The biggest.” As the employees of Mayflower filed out of the building for the night, Carl held on to Kipler in the coatroom, squeezing him tightly, feeling the man’s heartbeat throb against his face. For a while, everything went quiet. Carl returned to mouth food with an animal focus, but he couldn’t keep it down, and all the time he fretted about the U.V. panels. Showing up, who knows, in traffic lights. On televisions. At home, pulsing from his mirror. He stayed cautious of screens, skipped past them quickly. The winter failed, and along came April, one of the twelve punishments. Carl had seen this month too often by now and had hardened against its pleasures. April was a bastard name for a month so numb. Slush on the ground, a salty slurry in the air. Slush, most likely, in his insides, which he pictured as muddied guts down a hole. Day after day, Carl tromped to work. He tromped home. His pants grew stiff with salt. He lost his security clearance and was migrated through Mayflower’s cubicles once, twice. Finally, they exiled him, with the older, idea-free crowd, to a featureless room overlooking the vast, immaculate cafeteria. In Carl’s new work corridor, the employees went uninstructed and drastically unpoliced. Did they really work there? They shared a single computer and a pristine in-box. To Carl, the workspace was a petting zoo, without visitors. People moved from table to window to door, moaning. He did his best not to touch anyone. He soon lost his taste for food. Maybe he’d outgrown it, which possibly meant that his clock had finally run down, and O.K., that was O.K. A creature senses an ending. A window, a door, a hole opens, and he steps through. For now, he sipped the occasional yogurt drink and kept some bread nearby, but something had died in him, and he worried that eating, even a little, would feed it, would stoke the thing and bring it back to life. He felt safer with it gone. Sometimes Carl woke up confused. He spent time trying to figure out how to reverse what had happened. What was the opposite of a human grow light? He tried the obvious: darkness, the deepest kind. He tried it and tried it and tried it. At home for days with the shades down, then—where the darkness was so much better, so exquisite and fine—out of town, along the sand roads, under the salt pines, in the dunes, or deep in the woods off the highway. One night, the police picked him up, and they were not pleased. What face could Carl show them but his own, burned and unmoving? What he told them, at length and through his charred mouth, was not true and it was not enough. They drove him home in silence, and when they dropped him off they saw him all the way to his door and inside, and after Carl locked up he listened for a long time, but never did hear them walk away. At the age of forty-one, Carl left Mayflower and accepted an I.T. job in a school system near the water. Tech support turned out to be light bulbs, wind blinds, a chimney. Chairs, phones, walls. The yard, too. Carl would maintain all of them. The school kept Carl away from the children. He understood. Children’s fears should be managed. Sometimes their eyes need to be covered. So much is better left unseen. There would be more and greater to fear when they were older. Best to save room. But Carl found a way to tend the landscape in the mornings, at a squinting distance from the school doors. From afar, he was a faceless man in a jumpsuit, leaning into his shovel, Carl the Small, the frantic waver. Every day, the kids, fired like missiles from the yellow school buses, waved at Carl, and he saluted them all, righty-o. Hello there, you guys! People should always greet one another that way. If he could store a message for creatures thousands of years in the future, it would be simple. Upon meeting one another in whatever passes, in your world, for a room, a hallway, a road, a field, do not play dead while you are still alive. Just try to say hello. It turned out that there was a woman at the school who did not die from seeing Carl up close, again and again. They had lunch together, and lunch together, and lunch and a walk, and a weekend coffee, and lunch again, until something felt wrong when they didn’t meet up, even if it was to do nothing much at all but take the woods path, or walk, once night had come on, right through town. Her name was Maura, and she ran art and languages for the sixth graders. She asked what had happened to him, and he shook his head. He wanted to pull a long-story face. The hardened shell of him had withered by then, gone soft. It looked as if someone had died just outside his body and he was still wearing that person’s skin. He shook his head, that was all, and this was fine with her. She said she understood. Which meant, to Carl, that in one way or another maybe Maura was keeping to her own nondisclosure agreement, one that she’d struck with herself or others, sometime in the past, far from here. It was no romance, which relieved them both. Maura and Carl were plain about what they needed to feel pleasure. If their intimacy could feel turn-based and a little like a chore, just friends bestowing favors, like old women doing each other’s hair, it was at least a manageable sorrow that he could endure. He could keep an eye on it and be sure that it didn’t grow. Maura was older than Carl. She was kinder, finer-looking, more at peace, as far as he knew, with having been born. What a gift, not to be constantly scouting for an exit! And if Carl felt private or mean he knew to leave the house and pour out his cruelty in a safe place, where Maura could not be hurt. Perhaps what was most animal in him had been cooked out by Kipler and his rig, burned or boiled or just reduced so that it hardly ever appeared. He hated to think so positively, because he felt as if it did a kind of violence to his brain, but perhaps something good had come of all that heat, all that light. An off-script use case to the human grow light that no doubt they’d never suspect over at Mayflower: you could use that fierce power to eliminate the wrong and rotten parts of yourself. Not a grow light at all but the reverse, which felt better to Carl than he would have liked to admit. It was probably not the Lord who allowed Maura to conceive a child, even though she thanked Him. Carl tried thanking Him, too. His policy on the matter—as they tended her pregnancy all summer and into the fall, walking to school together on weekday mornings before silently parting for the day, then meeting again for the walk home—was that gratitude needed only to be released from one’s person, spoken out loud. From there, it could find its proper destination on its own. When his son was born, on a cold, cloudless October night, Carl could not help himself. Some very old words came back to him. What a tremendously ridiculous person he’d become, even though nothing that had happened to him had been ridiculous at all. The words he recalled were somehow suddenly available, wanting out. He whispered them, over and over, until the little creature, still unnamed, mouth bubbling on Maura’s tummy, fell asleep for the very first time in his life: Someone new is among us. Someone special. It hurt him to say this, because he was Carl. He knew the odds, the science, the facts. Or at least he used to. Was such a statement really as grossly untrue as it seemed? Just him being wishful, being scared? What, really, was so special about one more boy in the world? Maybe the verdict on this could stay out for now. Just scattered into the distance, a verdict you could never really reach, even if you wanted to. Maybe, in whatever time he had left, Carl would work as hard as he could to keep the verdict on that question, along with every other question that pressed in, as far away from his family as humanly possible.

The entire ride would take eleven minutes. That was what the boy had promised us, the boy who never showed. To be honest, I hadn’t expected to find the chairlift. Not through the maze of old-growth firs and not in the dwindling light. Not without our escort. A minute earlier, I’d been on the brink of suggesting that we give up and hike back to the logging road. But at the peak of our despondency we saw it: the lift, rising like a mirage out of the timber woods, its four dark cables striping the red sunset. Chairs were floating up the mountainside, forty feet above our heads. Empty chairs, upholstered in ice, swaying lightly in the wind. Sailing beside them, just as swiftly and serenely, a hundred chairs came down the mountain. As if a mirror were malfunctioning, each chair separating from a buckle-bright double. Nobody was manning the loading station; if we wanted to take the lift we’d have to do it alone. I squeezed Clara’s hand. A party awaited us at the peak. Or so we’d been told by Mr. No-Show, Mr. Nowhere, a French boy named Eugene de La Rochefoucauld. “I bet his real name is Burt,” Clara said angrily. We had never been stood up before. “I bet he’s actually from Tennessee.” Well, he had certainly seemed European, when we met him coming down the mountain road on horseback, one week ago this night. He’d had that hat! Such a convincingly stupid goatee! He’d pronounced his name as if he were coughing up a jewel. Eugene de La Rochefoucauld had proffered a nasally invitation: would we be his guests next Saturday night, at the gala opening of the Evergreen Lodge? We’d ride the new chairlift with him to the top of the mountain, and be among the first visitors to the marvellous new ski resort. The President himself might be in attendance. Clara, unintimidated, had flirted back. “Two dates—is that not being a little greedy, Eugene?” “No less would be acceptable,” he’d said, smiling, “for a man of my stature.” (Eugene was five feet four; we’d assumed he meant education, wealth.) The party was to be held seven thousand feet above Lucerne, Oregon, the mountain town where we had marooned ourselves, at nineteen and twenty-two; still pretty (Clara was beautiful), still young enough to attract notice, but penniless, living week to week in a “historic” boarding house. “Historic” had turned out to be the landlady’s synonym for “haunted.” “Turn-of-the-century sash windows,” we’d discovered, meant “pneumonia holes.” We’d waited for Eugene for close to an hour, while Time went slinking around the forest, slyly rearranging its shadows; now a red glow clung to the huge branches of the Douglas firs. When I finally spoke, the bony snap in my voice startled us both. “We don’t need him, Clara.” “We don’t?” “No. We can get there on our own.” Clara turned to me with blue lips and flakes daggering her lashes. I felt a pang: I could see both that she was afraid of my proposal and that she could be persuaded. This is a terrible knowledge to possess about a friend. Nervously, I counted my silver and gold bracelets, meting out reasons for making the journey. If we did not make the trip, I would have to pawn them. I argued that it was riskier not to take this risk. (For me, at least; Clara had her wealthy parents waiting back in Florida. As much as we dared together, we never risked our friendship by bringing up that gulf.) I touched the fake red flower pinned to my black bun. What had we gone to all this effort for? We owed our landlady twelve dollars for January’s rent. Did Clara prefer to wait in the drifts for our prince, that fake frog, Eugene, to arrive? For months, all anybody in Lucerne had been able to talk about was this lodge, the centerpiece of a new ski resort on Mt. Joy. Another New Deal miracle. In his Fireside Chats, Roosevelt had promised us that these construction projects would lift us out of the Depression. Sometimes I caught myself squinting hungrily at the peak, as if the government money might be visible, falling from the actual clouds. Out-of-work artisans had flocked to northern Oregon: carpenters, masons, weavers, engineers. The Evergreen Lodge, we’d heard, had original stonework, carved from five thousand pounds of native granite. Its doors were cathedral huge, made of hand-cut ponderosa pine. Murals had been commissioned from local artists: scenes of mountain wildflowers, rearing bears. Quilts covered the beds, hand-crocheted by the New Deal men. I loved to picture their callused black thumbs on the bridally white muslin. Architecturally, what was said to stun every visitor was the main hall: a huge hexagonal chamber, with a band platform and “acres for dancing, at the top of the world!” W.P.A. workers cut trails into the side of Mt. Joy, assisted by the Civilian Conservation Corps boys from Camp Thistle and Camp Bountiful. I’d seen these young men around town, on leave from the woods, in their mud-caked boots and khaki shirts with the government logo. Their greasy faces clumped together like olives in a jar. They were the young mechanics who had wrenched the lift out of a snowy void and into skeletal, functioning existence. To raise bodies from the base of the mountain to the summit in eleven minutes! It sounded like one of Jules Verne’s visions. “See that platform?” I said to Clara. “Stand there, and fall back into the next chair. I’ll be right behind you.” At first, the climb was beautiful. An evergreen army held its position in the whipping winds. Soon, the woods were replaced by fields of white. Icy outcroppings rose like fangs out of a pink-rimmed sky. We rose, too, our voices swallowed by the cables’ groaning. Clara was singing something that I strained to hear, and failed to comprehend. “Good news. We’re the hundredth caller.”Buy the print » Clara and I called ourselves the Prospectors. Our fathers, two very different kinds of gambler, had been obsessed with the Gold Rush, and we grew up hearing stories about Yukon fever and the Klondike stampeders. We knew the legend of the farmer who had panned out a hundred and thirty thousand dollars, the clerk who dug up eighty-five thousand, the blacksmith who discovered a haul of the magic metal on Rabbit Creek and made himself a hundred grand richer in a single hour. This period of American history held a special appeal for Clara’s father, Mr. Finisterre, a bony-faced Portuguese immigrant to southwestern Florida who had wrung his modest fortune out of the sea-damp wallets of tourists. My own father had killed himself outside the dog track in the spring of 1931, and I’d been fortunate to find a job as a maid at the Hotel Finisterre. Clara Finisterre was the only other maid on staff—a summer job. Her parents were strict and oblivious people. Their thousand rules went unenforced. They were very busy with their guests. A sea serpent, it was rumored, haunted the coastline beside the hotel, and ninety per cent of our tourism was serpent-driven. Amateur teratologists in Panama hats read the newspaper on the veranda, drinking orange juice and idly scanning the horizon for fins. “Thank you,” Mr. Finisterre whispered to me once, too sozzled to remember my name, “for keeping the secret that there is no secret.” The black Atlantic rippled emptily in his eyeglasses. Every night, Mrs. Finisterre hosted a cocktail hour: cubing green and orange melon, cranking songs out of the ivory gramophone, pouring bright malice into the fruit punch in the form of a mentally deranging Portuguese rum. She’d apprenticed her three beautiful daughters in the Light Arts, the Party Arts. Clara was her eldest. Together, the Finisterre women smoothed arguments and linens. They concocted banter, gab, palaver, patter—every sugary variety of small talk that dissolves into the night. I hated the cocktail hour, and, whenever I could, I escaped to beat rugs and sweep leaves on the hotel roof. One Monday, however, I heard footsteps ringing on the ladder. It was Clara. She saw me and froze. Bruises were thickening all over her arms. They were that brilliant pansy-blue, the beautiful color that belies its origins. Automatically, I crossed the roof to her. We clacked skeletons; to call it an “embrace” would misrepresent the violence of our first collision. To soothe her, I heard myself making stupid jokes, babbling inanities about the weather, asking in my vague and meandering way what could be done to help her; I could not bring myself to say, plainly, Who did this to you? Choking on my only real question, I offered her my cardigan—the way you’d hand a sick person a tissue. She put it on. She buttoned all the buttons. You couldn’t tell that anything was wrong now. This amazed me, that a covering so thin could erase her bruises. I’d half-expected them to bore holes through the wool. “Don’t worry, O.K.?” she said. “I promise, it’s nothing.” “I won’t tell,” I blurted out—although of course I had nothing to tell beyond what I’d glimpsed. Night fell, and I was shivering now, so Clara held me. Something subtle and real shifted inside our embrace—nothing detectable to an observer, but a change I registered in my bones. For the duration of our friendship, we’d trade off roles like this: anchor and boat, beholder and beheld. We must have looked like some Janus-faced statue, our chins pointing east and west. An unembarrassed silence seemed to be on loan to us from the distant future, where we were already friends. Then I heard her say, staring over my shoulder at the darkening sea: “What would you be, Aubby, if you lived somewhere else?” “I’d be a prospector,” I told her, without batting an eye. “I’d be a prospector of the prospectors. I’d wait for luck to strike them, and then I’d take their gold.” Clara laughed and I joined in, amazed—until this moment, I hadn’t considered that my days at the hotel might be eclipsing other sorts of lives. Clara Finisterre was someone whom I thought of as having a fate to escape, but I wouldn’t have dignified my own prospects that way, by calling them “a fate.” A week later, Clara took me to a débutante ball at a tacky mansion that looked rabid to me, frothy with white marble balconies. She introduced me as “my best friend, Aubergine.” Thus began our secret life. We sifted through the closets and the jewelry boxes of our hosts. Clara tutored me in the social graces, and I taught Clara what to take, and how to get away with it. One night, Clara came to find me on the roof. She was blinking muddily out of two black eyes. Who was doing this—Mr. Finisterre? Someone from the hotel? She refused to say. I made a deal with Clara: she never had to tell me who, but we had to leave Florida. The next day, we found ourselves at the train station, with all our clothes and savings. Those first weeks alone were an education. The West was very poor at that moment, owing to the Depression. But it was still home to many aspiring and expiring millionaires, and we made it our job to make their acquaintance. One aging oil speculator paid for our meals and our transit and required only that we absorb his memories; Clara nicknamed him the “allegedly legendary wit.” He had three genres of tale: business victories; sporting adventures that ended in the death of mammals; and eulogies for his former virility. We met mining captains and fishing captains, whose whiskers quivered like those of orphaned seals. The freckled heirs to timber fortunes. Glazy baronial types, with portentous and misguided names: Romulus and Creon, who were pleased to invite us to gala dinners, and to use us as their gloating mirrors. In exchange for this service, Clara and I helped ourselves to many fine items from their houses. Clara had a magic satchel that seemed to expand with our greed, and we stole everything it could swallow. Dessert spoons, candlesticks, a poodle’s jewelled collar. We strode out of parties wearing our hostess’s two-toned heels, woozy with adrenaline. Crutched along by Clara’s sturdy charm, I was swung through doors that led to marmoreal courtyards and curtained salons and, in many cases, master bedrooms, where my skin glowed under the warm reefs of artificial lighting. “This may be bliss for you, Felicia, but my pants are crawling with chiggers!”Buy the print » But winter hit, and our mining prospects dimmed considerably. The Oregon coastline was laced with ghost towns; two paper mills had closed, and whole counties had gone bankrupt. Men were flocking inland to the mountains, where the rumor was that the W.P.A. had work for construction teams. I told Clara that we needed to follow them. So we thumbed a ride with a group of work-starved Astoria teen-agers who had heard about the Evergreen Lodge. Gold dust had drawn the first prospectors to these mountains; those boys were after the weekly three-dollar salary. But if government money was snowing onto Mt. Joy, it had yet to reach the town below. I’d made a bad miscalculation, suggesting Lucerne. Our first night in town, Clara and I stared at our faces superimposed over the dark storefront windows. In the boarding house, we lay awake in the dark, pretending to believe in each other’s theatrical sleep; only our bellies were honest, growling at each other. Why did you bring us here? Clara never dreamed of asking me. With her generous amnesia, she seemed already to have forgotten that leaving home had been my idea. Day after day, I told Clara not to worry: “We just need one good night.” We kept lying to each other, pretending that our hunger was part of the game. Social graces get you meagre results in a shuttered town. We started haunting the bars around the C.C.C. camps. The gaunt men there had next to nothing, and I felt a pang lifting anything from them. Back in the boarding house, our fingers spidering through wallets, we barely spoke to each other. Clara and I began to disappear into adjacent rooms with strangers. She was better off before, my mind whispered. For the first time since we’d left Florida, it occurred to me that our expedition might fail. The chairlift ascended seven thousand two hundred and fifty feet—I remembered this figure from the newspapers. It had meant very little to me in the abstract. But now I felt our height in the soles of my feet. For whole minutes, we lost sight of the mountain in an onrush of mist. Finally, hands were waiting to catch us. They shot out of the darkness, gripping me under the arms, swinging me free of the lift. Our empty chairs were whipped around by the huge bull wheel before starting the long flight downhill. Hands, wonderfully warm hands, were supporting my back. “Eugene?” I called, my lips numb. “Who’s You-Jean?” a strange voice chuckled. The man who was not Eugene turned out to be an ursine mountaineer. With his lantern held high, he peered into our faces. I recognized the drab green C.C.C. uniform. He looked about our age to me, although his face kept blurring in the snow. The lantern, battery powered, turned us all jaundiced shades of gold. He had no clue, he said, about any Eugene. But he’d been stationed here to escort guests to the lodge. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw tears freezing onto Clara’s cheeks. Already she was fluffing her hair, asking this government employee how he’d gotten the enviable job of escorting beautiful women across the snows. How quickly she was able to snap back into character! I could barely move my frozen tongue, and I trudged along behind them. “How old are you girls?” the C.C.C. man asked, and “Where are you from?,” and every lie that we told him made me feel safer in his company. The lodge was a true palace. Its shadow alone seemed to cover fifty acres of snow. Electricity raised a yellowish aura around it, so that the resort loomed like a bubble pitched against the mountain sky. Its A-frame reared out of the woods with the insensate authority of any redwood tree. Lights blazed in every window. As we drew closer, we saw faces peering down at us from several of these. The terror was still with us. The speed of the ascent. My blood felt carbonated. Six feet ahead of us, Not-Eugene, whose name we’d failed to catch, swung the battery-powered lamp above his head and guided us through a whale-gray tunnel made of ice. “Quite the runway to a party, eh?” Two enormous polished doors blew inward, and we found ourselves in a rustic ballroom, with fireplaces in each corner shooting heat at us. Amethyst chandeliers sent lakes of light rippling across the dance floor; the stone chimneys looked like indoor caves. Over the bar, a mounted boar grinned tuskily down at us. Men mobbed us, handing us fizzing drinks, taking our coats. Deluged by introductions, we started giggling, handing our hands around: “Nilson, Pauley, Villanueva, Obadiah, Acker . . .” Proudly, each identified himself to us as one of the C.C.C. “tree soldiers” who had built this fantasy resort: masons and blacksmiths and painters and foresters. They were boys, I couldn’t help but think, boys our age. More faces rose out of the shadows, beaming hard. I guessed that, like us, they’d been waiting for this night to come for some time. Someone lit two cigarettes, passed them our way. I shivered now with expectation. Clara threaded her hand through mine and squeezed down hard—time to dive into the sea. We’d plunged into stranger waters, socially. How many nights had we spent together, listening to tourists speak in tongues, relieved of their senses by Mrs. Finisterre’s rum punch? Most of the boys were already drunk—I could smell that. Some rocked on their heels, desperate to start dancing. They led us toward the bar. Feeling came flooding back into my skin, and I kept laughing at everything these young men were saying, elated to be indoors with them. Clara had to pinch me through the puffed sleeve of my dress: “Aubby? Are we the only girls here?” Clara was right: where were the socialites we’d expected to see? The Oregon state forester, with his sullen red-lipped wife? The governor, the bank presidents? The ski experts from the Swiss Alps? Fifty-two paying guests, selected by lottery, had rooms waiting for them—we’d seen the list of names in Sunday’s Oregon Gazette. I turned to a man with wise amber eyes. He had unlined skin and a wispy blond mustache, but he smiled at us with the mellow despair of an old goat. “Excuse me, sir. When does the celebration start?” Clara flanked him on the left, smiling just as politely. “Are we the first guests to arrive?” But now the goat’s eyes flamed: “Whadda you talkin’ about? This party is under way, lady. You got twenty-six dancing partners to choose from out there—that ain’t enough?” The strength of his fury surprised us; backing up, I bumped my hip against a bannister. My hand closed on what turned out to be a tiny beaver, a carved ornament. Each cedar newel post had one. “The woodwork is beautiful.” He grinned, soothed by the compliment. “My supervisor is none other than O. B. Dawson.” “And your name?” The thought appeared unbidden: Later, you’ll want to know what to scream. “Mickey Loatch. Got a wife, girls, I’m chagrined to say. Got three kids already, back in Osprey. I’m here so they can eat.” Casually, he explained to us the intensity of his loneliness, the loneliness of the entire corps. They’d been driven by truck, eight miles each day, from Camp Thistle to the deep woods. For months at a time, they lived away from their families. Drinking water came from Lister bags; the latrines were saddle trenches. Everyone was glad, glad, glad, he said, to have the work. “There wasn’t anything for us, until the Emerald Lodge project came along.” “What makes him the bad cop is that he’s in the wrong interrogation room and he just gave you my doughnut.”Buy the print » Mr. Loatch, I’d been noticing, had the strangest eyes I’d ever seen. They were a brilliant dark yellow, the color of that magic metal, gold. Swallowing, I asked the man, “Excuse me, but I’m a bit confused. Isn’t this the Evergreen Lodge?” “The Evergreen Lodge?” the man said, exposing a mouthful of chewed pink sausage. “Where’s dat, gurrls?” He laughed at his own cartoony voice. A suspicion was coming into focus, a dreadful theory; I tried to talk it away, but the harder I looked, the keener it became. A quick scan of the room confirmed what I must have registered and ignored when I first walked through those doors. Were all of the boys’ eyes this same hue? Trying to stay calm, I gripped Clara’s hand and spun her around like a weathervane: gold, gold, gold, gold. “Oh my God, Clara.” “Aubby? What’s wrong with you?” “Clara,” I murmured, “I think we may have taken the wrong lift.” Two lodges existed on Mt. Joy. There was the Evergreen Lodge, which would be unveiled tonight, in a ceremony of extraordinary opulence, attended by the state forester and the President. Where Eugene was likely standing, on the balcony level, raising a flute for the champagne toast. There had once been, however, on the southeastern side of this same mountain, a second structure. This place lived on in local memory as demolished hope, as unconsummated blueprint. It was the failed original, crushed by an avalanche two years earlier, the graveyard of twenty-six workers from Company 609 of the Oregon Civilian Conservation Corps. “Unwittingly,” our landlady, who loved a bloody and unjust story, had told us over a pancake breakfast, “those workers were building their own casket.” With tobogganing runs and a movie theatre, and more windows than Versailles, it was to have been even more impressive than the Evergreen Lodge. But the unfinished lodge had been completely covered in the collapse. Mickey Loatch was still steering us around, showing off the stonework. “Have you gals been to the Cloud Cap Inn? That’s hitched to the mountain with wire cables. See, what we done is—” “Mr. Loatch?” Swilling a drink, I steadied my voice. “How late does the chairlift run?” “Oh dear.” He pursed his lips. “You girls gotta be somewhere? I’m afraid you’re stuck with us, at least until morning. You’re the last we let up. They shut that lift down until dawn.” Next to me, I heard Clara in my ear: “Are you crazy? We just got here, and you’re talking about leaving? Do you know how rude you sound?” “They’re dead.” “What are you talking about? Who’s dead?” “Everyone. Everyone but us.” Clara turned from me, her jaw tensing. At a nearby table, five green-clad boys were watching our conversation play out with detached interest, as if it were a sport they rarely followed. Clara wet her lips and smiled down at them, drumming her red nails on their table’s glossy surface. “This is so beautiful!” she cooed. All five of the dead boys blushed. “Excuse us,” she fluttered. “Is there a powder room? My friend here is just a mess!” “The Ladies Room” read a bronzed sign posted on an otherwise undistinguished door. At other parties, this room had always been our sanctuary. Once the door was shut, we stared at each other in the mirror, transferring knowledge across the glass. Her eyes were still brown, I noted with relief, and mine were blue. I worried that I might start screaming, but I bit back my panic, and I watched Clara do the same for me. “Your nose,” I finally murmured. Blood poured in bright bars down her upper lip. “I guess we must be really high up,” she said, and started to cry. “Shh, shh, shh . . . ” I wiped at the blood with a tissue. “See?” I showed it to her. “At least we are, ah, at least we can still . . .” Clara sneezed violently, and we stared at the reddish globules on the glass, which stood out with terrifying lucidity against the flat, unreal world of the mirror. “What are we going to do, Aubby?” I shook my head; a horror flooded through me until I could barely breathe. Ordinarily, I would have handled the logistics of our escape—picked locks, counterfeited tickets. Clara would have corrected my lipstick and my posture, encouraging me to look more like a willowy seductress and less like a baseball umpire. But tonight it was Clara who formulated the plan. We had to tiptoe around the Emerald Lodge. We had to dim our own lights. And, most critical to our survival here, according to Clara: We had to persuade our dead hosts that we believed they were alive. At first, I objected; I thought these workers deserved to know the truth about themselves. “Oh?” Clara said. “How principled of you.” And what did I think was going to happen, she asked, if we told the men what we knew? “I don’t know. They’ll let us go?” Clara shook her head. “Think about it, Aubby—what’s keeping this place together?” We had to be very cautious, very amenable, she argued. We couldn’t challenge our hosts on any of their convictions. The Emerald Lodge was a real place, and they were breathing safely inside it. We had to admire their handiwork, she said. Continue to exclaim over the lintel arches and the wrought-iron grates, the beams and posts. As if they were real, as if they were solid. Clara begged me to do this. Who knew what might happen if we roused them from their dreaming? The C.C.C. workers’ ghosts had built this place, Clara said; we were at their mercy. If the men discovered they were dead, we’d die with them. We needed to believe in their rooms until dawn—just long enough to escape them. “Same plan as ever,” Clara said. “How many hundreds of nights have we staked a claim at a party like this?” Zero, I told her. On no occasion had we been the only living people. “We’ll charm them. We’ll drink a little, dance a little. And then, come dawn, we’ll escape down the mountain.” Somebody started pounding on the door: “Hey! What’s the holdup, huh? Somebody fall in? You girls wanna dance or what?” “Almost ready!” Clara shouted brightly. On the dance floor, the amber-eyed ghosts were as awkward and as touching, as unconvincingly brash as any boys in history on the threshold of a party. Innocent hopefuls with their hats pressed to their chests. “I feel sorry for them, Clara! They have no idea.” “Yes. It’s terribly sad.” Her face hardened into a stony expression I’d seen on her only a handful of times in our career as prospectors. “Would you please refrain from texting while I’m operating!”Buy the print » “When we get back down the mountain, we can feel sad,” she said. “Right now, we are going to laugh at all their jokes. We are going to celebrate this stupendous American landmark, the Emerald Lodge.” Clara’s mother owned an etiquette book for women, the first chapter of which advises, Make Your Date Feel Like He Is the Life of the Party! People often mistake laughing girls for foolish creatures. They mistake our merriment for nerves or weakness, or the hysterical looning of desire. Sometimes, it is that. But not tonight. We could hold our wardens hostage, too, in this careful way. Everybody needs an audience. At other parties, our hosts had always been very willing to believe us when we feigned interest in their endless rehearsals of the past. They used our black pupils to polish up their antique triumphs. Even an ogreish salmon-boat captain, a bachelor again at eighty-seven, was convinced that we were both in love with him. Nobody ever invited Clara and me to a gala to hear our honest opinions. At the bar, a calliope of tiny glasses was waiting for me: honey and cherry and lemon. Flavored liquors, imported from Italy, the bartender smiled shyly. “Delicious!” I exclaimed, touching each to my lips. Clara, meanwhile, had been swept onto the dance floor. With her mauve lipstick in place and her glossy hair smoothed, she was shooting colors all around the room. Could you scare a dead boy with the vibrancy of your life? “Be careful,” I mouthed, motioning her into the shadows. Boys in green beanies kept sidling up to her, vying for her attention. It hurt my heart to see them trying. Of course, news of their own death had not reached them—how could that news get up the mountain, to where the workers were buried under snow? Perched on the barstool, I plaited my hair. I tried to think up some good jokes. “Hullo. Care if I join you?” This dead boy introduced himself as Lee Covey. Black bangs flopped onto his brow. He had the small, recessed, comically despondent face of a pug dog. I liked him immediately. And he was so funny that I did not have to theatricalize my laughter. Lee’s voluble eyes made conversation feel almost unnecessary; his conviction that he was alive was contagious. “I’m not much of a dancer,” Lee apologized abruptly. As if to prove his point, he sent a glass crashing off the bar. “Oh, that’s O.K. I’m not, either. See my friend out there?” I asked. “In the green dress? She’s the graceful one.” But Lee kept his golden eyes fixed on me, and soon it became difficult to say who was the mesmerist and who was succumbing to hypnosis. His Camp Thistle stories made me laugh so hard that I worried about falling off the barstool. Lee had a rippling laugh, like summer thunder; by this point I was very drunk. Lee started in on his family’s sorry history: “Daddy the Dwindler, he spent it all, he lost everything we had, he turned me out of the house. It fell to me to support the family . . . ” I nodded, recognizing his story’s contours. How had the other workers washed up here? I wondered. Did they remember their childhoods, their lives before the avalanche? Or had those memories been buried inside them? It was the loneliest feeling, to watch the group of dead boys dancing. Coupled off, they held on to each other’s shoulders. “For practice,” Lee explained. They steered each other uncertainly around the hexagonal floor, swaying on currents of song. “Say, how about it?” Lee said suddenly. “Let’s give it a whirl—you only live once.” Seconds later, we were on the floor, jitterbugging in the center of the hall. “Oh, oh, oh,” he crooned. When Lee and I kissed, it felt no different from kissing a living mouth. We sank into the rhythms of horns and strings and harmonicas, performed by a live band of five dead mountain brothers. With the naïve joy of all these ghosts, they tootled their glittery instruments at us. A hand grabbed my shoulder. “May I cut in?” Clara dragged me off the floor. Back in the powder room, Clara’s eyes looked shiny, raccoon-beady. She was exhausted, I realized. Some grins are only reflexes, but others are courageous acts—Clara’s was the latter. The clock had just chimed ten-thirty. The party showed no signs of slowing. At least the clock is moving, I pointed out. We tried to conjure a picture of the risen sun, piercing the thousand windows of the Emerald Lodge. “You doing O.K.?” “I have certainly been better.” “We’re going to make it down the mountain.” “Of course we are.” Near the western staircase, Lee waited with a drink in hand. Shadows pooled unnaturally around his feet; they reminded me of peeling paint. If you stared too long, they seemed to curl slightly up from the floorboards. “Jean! There you are!” At the sound of my real name, I felt electrified—hadn’t I introduced myself by a pseudonym? Clara and I had a telephone book of false names. It was how we dressed for parties. We chose alter egos for each other, like jewelry. “It’s Candy, actually.” I smiled politely. “Short for Candace.” “Whatever you say, Jean,” Lee said, playing lightly with my bracelet. “Who told you that? Did my friend tell you that?” “You did.” I blinked slowly at Lee, watching his grinning face come in and out of focus. I’d had plenty more to drink, and I realized that I didn’t remember half the things we’d talked about. What else, I wondered, had I let slip? “How did you get that name, huh? It’s a really pretty name, Jeannie.” I was unused to being asked personal questions. Lee put his arms around me, and then, unbelievably, I heard my voice in the darkness, telling the ghost a true story. Jean, I told him, is what I prefer to go by. In Florida, most everybody called me Aubby. My parents named me Aubergine. They wanted me to have a glamorous name. It was a luxury they could afford to give me, a spell of protection. “Aubergine” was a word that my father had learned during his wartime service, the French word for “dawn,” he said. A name like that, they felt, would envelop me in an aura of mystery, from swaddling to shroud. One night, on a rare trip to a restaurant, we learned the truth from a fellow-diner, a bald, genteel eavesdropper. “Aubergine,” he said thoughtfully. “What an interesting name.” We beamed at him eagerly, my whole family. “It is, of course, the French word for ‘eggplant.’ ” “Oh, darn!” my mother said, unable to contain her sorrow. “Of course!” roared old dad. “You may now begin your insane experiment.”August 23, 2004Buy the print » But we were a family long accustomed to reversals of fortune; in fact, my father had gone bankrupt misapprehending various facts about the dog track and his own competencies. “It suits you,” the bald diner said, smiling and turning the pages of his newspaper. “You are a little fat, yes? Like an eggplant!” “We call her Jean for short,” my mother had smoothly replied. Clara was always teasing me. “Don’t fall in love with anybody,” she’d say, and then we’d laugh for longer than the joke really warranted, because this scenario struck us both as so unlikely. But as I leaned against this ghost I felt my life falling into place. It was the spotlight of his eyes, those radiant beams, that gently drew motes from the past out of me—and I loved this. He had got me talking, and now I didn’t want to shut up. His eyes grew wider and wider, golden nets woven with golden fibers. I told him about my father’s suicide, my mother’s death. At the last second, I bit my tongue, but I’d been on the verge of telling him about Clara’s bruises, those mute blue coördinates. Not to solicit Lee’s help—what could this phantom do? No, merely to keep him looking at me. Hush, Aubby, I heard in Clara’s tiny, moth-fluttery voice, which was immediately incinerated by the hot pleasure of Lee’s gaze. We kissed a second time. I felt our teeth click together; two warm hands cupped my cheeks. But when he lifted his face, his anguish leapt out at me. His wild eyes were like bees trapped on the wrong side of a window, bouncing along the glass. “You . . . ” he began. He stroked at my cheek. “You feel . . . ” Very delicately, he tried kissing me again. “You taste . . . ” Some bewildered comment trailed off into silence. One hand smoothed over my dress, while the other rose to claw at his pale throat. “How’s that?” he whispered hoarsely in my ear. “Does that feel all right?” Lee was so much in the dark. I had no idea how to help him. I wondered how honest I would have wanted Lee to be with me, if he were in my shoes. Put him out of his misery, country people say of sick dogs. But Lee looked very happy. Excited, even, about the future. “Should we go upstairs, Jean?” “But where did Clara go?” I kept murmuring. It took great effort to remember her name. “Did she disappear on you?” Lee said, and winked. “Do you think she’s found her way upstairs, too?” Crossing the room, we spotted her. Her hands were clasped around the hog stubble of a large boy’s neck, and they were swaying in the center of the hexagon. I waved at her, trying to get her attention, and she stared right through me. A smile played on her face, while the chandeliers plucked up the red in her hair, strumming even the subtlest colors out of her. Grinning, Lee lifted a hand to his black eyebrow in a mock salute. His bloodless hand looked thin as paper. I had a sharp memory of standing at a bay window, in Florida, and feeling the night sky change direction on me—no longer lapping at the horizon but rolling inland. Something was pouring toward me now, a nothingness exhaled through the floury membrane of the boy. If Lee could see the difference in the transparency of our splayed hands, he wasn’t letting on. Now Clara was kissing her boy’s plush lips. Her fingers were still knitted around his tawny neck. Clara, Clara, we have abandoned our posts. We shouldn’t have kissed them; we shouldn’t have taken that black water onboard. Lee may not have known that he was dead, but my body did; it seemed to be having some kind of stupefied reaction to the kiss. I felt myself sinking fast, sinking far below thought. The two boys swept us toward the stairs with a courtly synchronicity, their uniformed bodies tugging us into the shadows, where our hair and our skin and our purple and emerald party dresses turned suddenly blue, like two candles blown out. And now I watched as Clara flowed up the stairs after her stocky dancing partner, laughing with genuine abandon, her neck flung back and her throat exposed. I followed right behind her, but I could not close the gap. I watched her ascent, just as I had on the lift. Groggily, I saw them moving down a posy-wallpapered corridor. Even squinting, I could not make out the watery digits on the doors. All these doors were, of course, identical. One swung open, then shut, swallowing Clara. I doubted we would find each other again. By now, however, I felt very calm. I let Lee lead me by the wrist, like a child, only my bracelets shaking. Room 409 had natural wood walls, glowing with a piney shine in the low light. Lee sat down on a chair and tugged off his work boots, flushed with the yellow avarice of 4 A.M. Darkness flooded steadily out of him, and I absorbed it. “Jean,” he kept saying, a word that sounded so familiar, although its meaning now escaped me. I covered his mouth with my mouth. I sat on the ghost boy’s lap, kissing his neck, pretending to feel a pulse. Eventually, grumbling an apology, Lee stood and disappeared into the bathroom. I heard a faucet turn on; Lord knows what came pouring out of it. The room had a queen bed, and I pulled back a corner of the soft cotton quilt. It was so beautiful, edelweiss white. I slid in with my dress still pinned to me. I could not stop yawning; seconds from now, I’d drop off. I never wanted to go back out there, I decided. Why lie about this? There was no longer any chairlift waiting to carry us home, was there? No mountain, no fool’s-gold moon. The Earth we’d left felt like a photograph. And was it such a terrible thing, to live at the lodge? Something was descending slowly, like a heavy theatre curtain, inside my body; I felt my will to know the truth ebbing into a happy, warm insanity. We could all be dead—why not? We could be in love, me and a dead boy. We could be sisters here, Clara and I, equally poor and equally beautiful. Lee had come back and was stroking my hair onto the pillow. “Want to take a little nap?” he asked. “No one’s last words were ‘I wish I’d done more homework.’ ”April 18, 2005Buy the print » I had never wanted anything more. But then I looked down at my red fingernails and noticed a tiny chip in the polish, exposing the translucent blue enamel. Clara had painted them for me yesterday morning, before the party—eons ago. Clara, I remembered. What was happening to Clara? I dug out of the heavy coverlet, struggling up. At precisely that moment, the door began to rattle in its frame; outside, a man was calling for Lee. “He’s here! He’s here! He’s here!” a baritone voice growled happily. “Goddammit, Lee, button up and get downstairs!” Lee rubbed his golden eyes and palmed his curls. I stared at him uncomprehendingly. “I regret the interruption, my dear. But this we cannot miss.” He grinned at me, exposing a mouthful of holes. “You wanna have your picture taken, don’tcha?” Clara and I found each other on the staircase. What had happened to her, in her room? That’s a lock I can’t pick. Even on ordinary nights, we often split up, and afterward we never discussed those unreal intervals in the boarding house. On our prospecting expeditions, whatever doors we closed stayed shut. Clara had her arm around her date, who looked doughier than I recalled, his round face almost featureless, his eyebrows vanished; even the point of his green toothpick seemed blurred. Lee ran up to greet him, and we hung back while the two men continued downstairs, racing each other to reach the photographer. This time we did not try to disguise our relief. “I was falling asleep!” Clara said. “And I wanted to sleep so badly, Aubby, but then I remembered you were here somewhere, too.” “I was falling asleep,” I said, “but then I remembered your face.” Clara redid my bun, and I straightened her hem. We were fine, we promised each other. “I didn’t get anything,” Clara said. “But I’m not leaving empty-handed.” I gaped at her. Was she still talking about prospecting? “You can’t steal from this place.” Clara had turned to inspect a sculpted flower blooming from an iron railing; she tugged at it experimentally, as if she thought she might free it from the bannister. “Clara, wake up. That’s not—” “No? That’s not why you brought me here?” She flicked her eyes up at me, her gaze limpid and accusatory. And I felt I’d become fluent in the language of eyes; now I saw what she’d known all along. What she’d been swallowing back on our prospecting trips, what she’d never once screamed at me, in the freezing boarding house: You use me. Every party, you bait the hook, and I dangle. I let them, I am eaten, and what do I get? Some scrap metal? “I’m sorry, Clara . . . ” My apology opened outward, a blossoming horror. I’d used her bruises to justify leaving Florida. I’d used her face to open doors. Greed had convinced me I could take care of her up here, and then I’d disappeared on her. How long had Clara known what I was doing? I’d barely known myself. But Clara, still holding my hand, pointed at the clock. It was 5 A.M. “Dawn is coming.” She gave me a wide, genuine smile. “We are going to get home.” Downstairs, the C.C.C. boys were shuffling around the dance floor, positioning themselves in a triangular arrangement. The tallest men knelt down, and the shorter men filed behind them. When they saw us watching from the staircase, they waved. “Where you girls been? The photographer is here.” The fires were still burning, the huge logs unconsumed. Even the walls, it seemed, were trembling in anticipation. This place wanted to go on shining in our living eyes, was that it? The dead boys feasted on our attention, but so did the entire structure. Several of the dead boys grabbed us and hustled us toward the posed and grinning rows of uniformed workers. We spotted a tripod in the corner of the lodge, a man doubled over, his head swallowed by the black cover. He was wearing a flamboyant costume: a ragged black cape, made from the same smocky material as the camera cover, and bright-red satin trousers. “Picture time!” his voice boomed. Now the true light of the Emerald Lodge began to erupt in rhythmic bursts. We winced at the metallic flash, the sun above his neck. The workers stiffened, their lean faces plumped by grins. It was an inversion of the standard firing squad: two dozen men hunched before the photographer and his mounted cannon. “Cheese!” the C.C.C. boys cried. We squinted against the radiant detonations. These blasts were much brighter and louder than any shutter click on Earth. With each flash, the men grew more definite: their chins sharpening, cheeks ripening around their smiles. Dim brows darkened to black arcs; the gold of their eyes deepened, as if each face were receiving a generous pour of whiskey. Was it life that these ghosts were drawing from the camera’s light? No, these flashes—they imbued the ghosts with something else. “Do not let him shoot you,” I hissed, grabbing Clara by the elbow. We ran for cover. Every time the flashbulb illuminated the room, I flinched. “Did he get you? Did he get me?” With an animal instinct, we knew to avoid that light. We could not let the photographer fix us in the frame, we could not let him capture us on whatever film still held them here, dancing jerkily on the hexagonal floor. If that happens, we are done for, I thought. We are here forever. With his unlidded eye, the photographer spotted us where we had crouched behind the piano. Bent at the waist, his head cloaked by the wrinkling purple-black cover, he rotated the camera. Then he waggled his fingers at us, motioning us into the frame. “Smile, ladies,” Mickey Loatch ordered, as we darted around the cedar tables. We never saw his face, but he was hunting us. This devil—excuse me, let us continue to call him “the party photographer,” as I do not want to frighten anyone unduly—spun the tripod on its rolling wheels, his hairy hands gripping its sides, the cover flapping onto his shoulders like a strange pleated wig. His single blue lens kept fixing on our bodies. Clara dove low behind the wicker chairs and pulled me after her. The C.C.C. boys who were assembled on the dance floor, meanwhile, stayed glacially frozen. Smiles floated muzzily around their faces. A droning rose from the room, a sound like dragonflies in summer, and I realized that we were hearing the men’s groaning effort to stay in focus: to flood their faces with ersatz blood, to hold still, hold still, and smile. Then the chair tipped; one of our pursuers had lifted Clara up, kicking and screaming, and began to carry her back to the dance floor, where men were shifting to make a place for her. “Front and center, ladies,” the company Captain called urgently. “Fix your dress, dear. The straps have gotten all twisted.” “You might want to do a rubber-glove count.”July 3, 2000Buy the print » I had a terrible vision of Clara caught inside the shot with them, her eyes turning from brown to umber to the deathlessly sparkling gold. “Stop!” I yelled. “Let her go! She—” She’s alive, I did not risk telling them. “She does not photograph well!” With aqueous indifference, the camera lifted its eye. “Listen, forgive us, but we cannot be in your photograph!” “Let go!” Clara said, cinched inside an octopus of restraining arms, every one of them pretending that this was still a game. We used to pledge, with great passion, always to defend each other. We meant it, too. These were easy promises to make, when we were safely at the boarding house; but on this mountain even breathing felt dangerous. But Clara pushed back. Clara saved us. She directed her voice at every object in the lodge, screaming at the very rafters. Gloriously, her speech gurgling with saliva and blood and everything wet, everything living, she began to howl at them, the dead ones. She foamed red, my best friend, forming the words we had been stifling all night, the spell-bursting ones: “It’s done, gentlemen. It’s over. Your song ended. You are news font; you are characters. I could read you each your own obituary. None of this—” “Shut her up,” a man growled. “Shut up, shut up!” several others screamed. She was chanting, one hand at her throbbing temple: “None of this, none of this, none of this is!” Some men were thumbing their ears shut. Some had braced themselves in the doorframes, as they teach the children of the West to do during earthquakes. I resisted the urge to cover my own ears as she bansheed back at the shocked ghosts: “Two years ago, there was an avalanche at your construction site. It was terrible, a tragedy. We were all so sorry . . . ” She took a breath. “You are dead.” Her voice grew gentle, almost maternal—it was like watching the wind drop out of the world, flattening a full sail. Her shoulders fell, her palms turned out. “You were all buried with this lodge.” Their eyes turned to us, incredulous. Hard and yellow, dozens of spiny armadillos. After a second, the C.C.C. company burst out laughing. Some men cried tears, they were howling so hard at Clara. Lee was among them, and he looked much changed, his face as smooth and flexibly white as an eel’s belly. These men—they didn’t believe her! And why should we ever have expected them to believe us, two female nobodies, two intruders? For these were the master carpenters, the master stonemasons and weavers, the master self-deceivers, the ghosts. “Dead,” one sad man said, as if testing the word out. “Dead. Dead. Dead,” his friends repeated, quizzically. But the sound was a shallow production, as if each man were scratching at topsoil with the point of a shovel. Aware, perhaps, that if he dug with a little more dedication he would find his body lying breathless under this world’s surface. “Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.” “Dead.” They croaked like pond frogs, all across the ballroom. “Dead” was a foreign word which the boys could pronounce perfectly, soberly and matter-of-factly, without comprehending its meaning. One or two of them, however, exchanged a glance; I saw a burly blacksmith cut eyes at the ruby-cheeked trumpet player. It was a guileful look, a what-can-be-done look. So they knew; or they almost knew; or they’d buried the knowledge of their deaths, and we had exhumed it. Who can say what the dead do or do not know? Perhaps the knowledge of one’s death, ceaselessly swallowed, is the very food you need to become a ghost. They burned that knowledge up like whale fat, and continued to shine on. But then a quaking began to ripple across the ballroom floor. A chandelier, in its handsome zigzag frame, burst into a spray of glass above us. One of the pillars, three feet wide, cracked in two. Outside, from all corners, we heard a rumbling, as if the world were gathering its breath. “Oh, God,” I heard one of them groan. “It’s happening again.” My eyes met Clara’s, as they always do at parties. She did not have to tell me: Run. On our race through the lodge, in all that chaos and din, Clara somehow heard another sound. A bright chirping. A sound like gold coins being tossed up, caught, and fisted. It stopped her cold. The entire building was shaking on its foundations, but through the tremors she spotted a domed cage, hanging in the foyer. On a tiny stirrup, a yellow bird was swinging. The cage was a wrought-iron skeleton, the handiwork of phantoms, but the bird, we both knew instantly, was real. It was agitating its wings in the polar air, as alive as we were. Its shadow was denser than anything in that ice palace. Its song split our eardrums. Its feathers burned into our retinas, rich with solar color, and its small body was stuffed with life. At the Evergreen Lodge, on the opposite side of the mountain, two twelve-foot doors, designed and built by the C.C.C., stand sentry against the outside air—seven hundred pounds of hand-cut ponderosa pine, from Oregon’s primeval woods. Inside the Emerald Lodge, we found their phantom twins, the dream originals. Those doors still worked, thank God. We pushed them open. Bright light, real daylight, shot onto our faces. The sun was rising. The chairlift, visible across a pillowcase of fresh snow, was running. We sprinted for it. Golden sunlight painted the steel cables. We raced across the platform, jumping for the chairs, and I will never know how fast or how far we flew to get back to Earth. In all our years of prospecting in the West, this was our greatest heist. Clara opened her satchel and lifted the yellow bird onto her lap, and I heard it shrieking the whole way down the mountain.

My father kept him in a stall, because he didn’t know where else to keep him. He had been given to my father by a friend, a sea captain, who said that he had bought him in Salonika; however, I learned from him directly that he was born in Colophon. I had been strictly forbidden to go anywhere near him, because, I was told, he was easily angered and would kick. But from my personal experience I can confirm that this was an old superstition, and from the time I was an adolescent I never paid much attention to the prohibition and in fact spent many memorable hours with him, especially in winter, and wonderful times in summer, too, when Trachi (that was his name) with his own hands put me on his back and took off at a mad gallop toward the woods on the hills. He had learned our language fairly easily, but retained a slight Levantine accent. Despite his two hundred and sixty years, his appearance was youthful, in both his human and his equine aspects. What I will relate here is the fruit of our long conversations. The centaurs’ origins are legendary, but the legends that they pass down among themselves are very different from the classical tales we know. Remarkably, their traditions also refer to a Noah-like inventor and savior, a highly intelligent man they call Cutnofeset. But there were no centaurs on Cutnofeset’s ark. Nor, by the way, were there “seven pairs of every species of clean beast, and a pair of every species of the beasts that are not clean.” The centaurian tradition is more rational than the Biblical, holding that only the archetypal animals, the key species, were saved: man but not the monkey; the horse but not the donkey or the wild ass; the rooster and the crow but not the vulture or the hoopoe or the gyrfalcon. How, then, did these species come about? Immediately afterward, the legend says. When the waters retreated, a deep layer of warm mud covered the earth. Now, this mud, which harbored in its decay all the enzymes from what had perished in the flood, was extraordinarily fertile: as soon as it was touched by the sun, it was covered with shoots from which grasses and plants of every type sprang forth; and, further, its soft, moist bosom was host to the marriages of all the species saved in the ark. It was a time, never to be repeated, of wild, ecstatic fecundity, in which the entire universe felt love, so intensely that it nearly returned to chaos. Those were the days when the earth itself fornicated with the sky, when everything germinated and everything was fruitful. Not only every marriage but every union, every contact, every encounter, even fleeting, even between different species, even between beasts and stones, even between plants and stones, was fertile, and produced offspring not in a few months but in a few days. The sea of warm mud, which concealed the earth’s cold, prudish face, was one boundless nuptial bed, all its recesses boiling over with desire and teeming with jubilant germs. This second creation was the true creation, because, according to what is passed down among the centaurs, there is no other way to explain certain similarities, certain convergences observed by all. Why is the dolphin similar to the fish, and yet gives birth and nurses its offspring? Because it’s the child of a tuna and a cow. Where do butterflies get their delicate colors and their ability to fly? They are the children of a flower and a fly. Tortoises are the children of a frog and a rock. Bats of an owl and a mouse. Conchs of a snail and a polished pebble. Hippopotami of a horse and a river. Vultures of a worm and an owl. And the big whales, the leviathans—how to explain their immense mass? Their wooden bones, their black and oily skin, and their fiery breath are living testimony to a venerable union in which—even when the end of all flesh had been decreed—that same primordial mud got greedy hold of the ark’s feminine keel, made of gopher wood and covered inside and out with shiny pitch. Such was the origin of every form, whether living today or extinct: dragons and chameleons, chimeras and harpies, crocodiles and minotaurs, elephants and giants, whose petrified bones are still found today, to our amazement, in the heart of the mountains. And so it was for the centaurs themselves, since in this festival of origins, in this panspermia, the few survivors of the human family also participated. Notably, Cam, the profligate son, participated: the first generation of centaurs originated in his wild passion for a Thessalian horse. From the beginning, these progeny were noble and strong, preserving the best of both equine and human nature. They were at once wise and courageous, generous and shrewd, good at hunting and at singing, at waging war and at observing the heavens. It seemed, in fact, as happens with the most felicitous unions, that the virtues of the parents were magnified in their offspring, since, at least in the beginning, they were more powerful and faster racers than their Thessalian mothers, and a good deal wiser and more cunning than black Cam and their other human fathers. This would also explain, according to some, their longevity, though others have attributed it to their eating habits, which I will come to in a moment. Or their longevity could simply be a projection across time of their great vitality, and this I, too, believe resolutely (and the story I am about to tell attests to it): that in hereditary terms the herbivore power of the horse counts less than the red blindness of the bloody and forbidden spasm, the moment of human-feral fullness in which the centaurs were conceived. Whatever we may think of this, anyone who has carefully considered the centaurs’ classical traditions cannot help noticing that centauresses are never mentioned. As I learned from Trachi, they do not in fact exist. The man-mare union, very seldom fertile today, produces and has produced only male centaurs, for which there must be a fundamental reason, though at present it eludes us. As for the inverse, the union between stallions and women, this has scarcely ever occurred, and comes about through the solicitation of dissolute women, who by nature are not particularly inclined to procreate. In the exceptional cases in which fertilization is successful in these rare unions, a dualistic female offspring is produced, her two natures, however, inversely assembled. The creatures have the head, neck, and front feet of a horse, but their back and belly are those of a human female, and the hind legs are human. During his long life Trachi had encountered very few of them, and he assured me that he felt no attraction to these squalid monsters. They were not “proud and nimble” but insufficiently vital; they were infertile, idle, and transient; they did not become familiar with man or learn to obey his commands but lived miserably in the densest forests, not in herds but in rural solitude. They fed on grass and berries, and when they were surprised by a man they had the curious habit of always presenting themselves to him head first, as if embarrassed by their human half. Trachi was born in Colophon of a secret union between a man and one of the numerous Thessalian horses that are still wild on the island. I am afraid that among the readers of these notes are some who may refuse to believe these assertions, since official science, permeated as it still is today with Aristotelianism, denies the possibility of a fertile union between different species. But official science often lacks humility: such unions are, indeed, generally infertile, but how often has evidence been sought? No more than a few dozen times. And has it been sought among all the innumerable possible couplings? Certainly not. Since I have no reason to doubt what Trachi has told me about himself, I must therefore encourage the incredulous to consider that there are more things in heaven and on earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy. He lived mostly in solitude, left to himself, which was the common destiny of those like him. He slept in the open, standing on all four hooves, with his head on his arms, which he would lean against a low branch or a rock. He grazed in the island’s fields and glades, or gathered fruit from branches; on the hottest days he would go down to one of the deserted beaches, and there he would bathe, swimming like a horse, chest and head erect, and then he would gallop for a long while, violently churning up the wet sand. But the bulk of his time, in every season, was devoted to food: in fact, during the forays that Trachi in the vigor of his youth frequently undertook among the barren cliffs and gorges of his native island, he always, following an instinct for prudence, brought along, tucked under his arms, two big bundles of grass or foliage, gathered in times of rest. Although centaurs are limited to a strictly vegetarian diet by their predominantly equine constitution, it must be remembered that they have a torso and a head like a man’s, which obliges them to introduce through a small human mouth the considerable quantity of grass, straw, or grain necessary to sustain their large bodies. These foods, notably of limited nutritional value, also require long mastication, since human teeth are not well adapted to the grinding of forage. In conclusion, the nourishment of centaurs is a laborious process; by physical necessity, they are required to spend three-quarters of their time chewing. This fact is not lacking in authoritative testimonials, first and foremost that of Ucalegon of Samos (Dig. Phil., XXIV, II–8 and XLIII passim), who attributes the centaurs’ proverbial wisdom to their alimentary regimen, which consists of one continuous meal from dawn to dusk: this deters them from other vain or baleful activities, such as gossip or the pursuit of riches, and contributes to their usual self-restraint. Bede also mentions this in his “Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum.” It is rather strange that the classical mythological tradition neglects this characteristic of centaurs. The truth of it rests on reliable evidence, and, as we have shown, it can be deduced by a simple consideration of natural philosophy. To return to Trachi: his education was, by our criteria, fragmentary. He learned Greek from the island’s shepherds, whose company he occasionally sought out, despite his shy and taciturn nature. From his own observations, he learned many subtle and intimate things about grasses, plants, forest animals, water, clouds, stars, and planets; I myself noticed that, even after his capture, and under a foreign sky, he could feel the approach of a gale or the imminence of a snowstorm many hours before it actually arrived. Though I couldn’t say how, nor could he himself, he also felt the grain growing in the fields, he felt the pulse of water in underground streams, and he sensed the erosion of flooded rivers. When De Simone’s cow gave birth two hundred metres away from us, he felt a reflex in his own gut; the same thing happened when the tenant farmer’s daughter gave birth. In fact, on a spring evening he informed me that a birth was taking place and, more precisely, in a particular corner of the hayloft; we went there and found that a bat had just brought into the world six blind little monsters, and was feeding them minuscule portions of her milk. All centaurs are made this way, he told me, feeling every germination, animal, human, or vegetable, as a wave of joy running through their veins. They also perceive, in the precordial region, and in the form of anxiety and tremulous tension, every desire and every sexual encounter that occurs in their vicinity; therefore, even though they are usually chaste, they enter into a state of vivid agitation during the season of love. We lived together for a long time: in some ways, I can say that we grew up together. Despite his advanced age, he was actually a young creature in everything he said and did, and he learned things so easily that it seemed pointless (not to mention awkward) to send him to school. I educated him myself, almost inadvertently, passing on to him the knowledge that I learned from my teachers. “I’ve got you on the waiting list, but I think it’s for a Birkin bag.”Buy the print » We kept him hidden as much as possible, partly because of his own explicit wish, partly because of a form of exclusive and jealous affection that we all felt for him, and partly because a combination of rationality and intuition advised us to shield him from unnecessary contact with our human world. Naturally, word of his presence in our barn leaked out among the neighbors. At first, they asked a lot of questions, some rather intrusive, but then, as will happen, their curiosity diminished from lack of nourishment. A few of our intimate friends were allowed to see him, the first of whom were the De Simones, and they swiftly became his friends, too. Only once, when a horsefly bite provoked a painful abscess in his rump, did we require the skill of a veterinarian, but he was an understanding and discreet man, who most scrupulously promised to keep this professional secret and, as far as I know, kept his promise. Things went differently with the blacksmith. Nowadays, blacksmiths are unfortunately rather scarce: we found one two hours away by foot, and he was a yokel, stupid and brutish. My father tried in vain to persuade him to maintain a certain reserve, in part by paying him tenfold for his services. It made no difference; every Sunday at the tavern he gathered a crowd around him and told the entire village about his strange client. Luckily, he liked his wine and was in the habit of telling tall tales when he was drunk, so he wasn’t taken too seriously. I find it painful to write this story. It is a story from my youth, and I feel that in writing it I am expelling it from myself, and that later I will feel bereft of something strong and pure. One summer Teresa De Simone, my childhood friend and cohort, returned to her parents’ house. She had gone to the city to study, and I hadn’t seen her for many years; I found her changed, and the change troubled me. Maybe I had fallen in love, but with little consciousness of it: what I mean is, I did not admit it to myself, not even hypothetically. She was quite lovely, shy, calm, and serene. As I’ve already mentioned, the De Simones were among the few neighbors whom we saw with some regularity. They knew Trachi and loved him. After Teresa’s return, we spent a long evening together, just the three of us. It was one of those unique, never-to-be-forgotten evenings: the moon, the crickets, the intense smell of hay, the air still and warm. We heard singing in the distance, and suddenly Trachi began to sing, without looking at us, as if in a dream. It was a long song, its rhythm bold and strong, with words I didn’t understand. A Greek song, Trachi said; but when we asked him to translate it he turned his head away and fell silent. We were all silent for a long time; then Teresa went home. The following morning, Trachi drew me aside and said this: “Oh, my dearest friend, my hour has come. I have fallen in love. That woman has got inside of me, and possesses me. I desire to see her and hear her, perhaps even touch her, and nothing else; I therefore desire something impossible. I am reduced to one point: there is nothing left of me except this desire. I am changing, I have changed, I have become another.” He told me other things as well, which I hesitate to write, because it’s unlikely that my words will do him justice. He told me that, since the previous night, he had become “a battlefield”; that he understood, as he never had before, the exploits of his violent ancestors, Nessus, Pholus; that his entire human half was crammed with dreams, with noble, courtly, and vain fantasies; that he wanted to accomplish reckless feats and fight for justice with the strength of his own arms, raze to the ground the densest forests with his vehemence, run to the ends of the earth, discover and conquer new lands, and create there the works of a fertile civilization. All of this, in a way that was obscure even to himself, he wanted to perform before the eyes of Teresa De Simone: to do it for her, to dedicate it to her. Finally, he told me, he realized the vanity of his dreams in the very act of dreaming them, and this was the content of the song of the previous evening, a song that he had learned long ago, during his adolescence in Colophon, and which he had never understood and never sung until now. For many weeks, nothing else happened; we saw the De Simones every so often, but Trachi’s behavior revealed nothing of the storm that raged inside him. It was I, and no one else, who provoked the breakdown. One October evening, Trachi was at the blacksmith’s. I met Teresa, and we went for a walk together in the woods. We talked, and of whom but Trachi? I didn’t betray my friend’s confidence, but I did worse. I quickly understood that Teresa was not as shy as she initially appeared to be: she chose, as if by chance, a narrow path that led into the thickest part of the woods; I knew it was a dead end, and knew that Teresa knew. Where the path came to an end, she sat down on dry leaves and I did the same. The valley bell tower rang out seven times, and she pressed up against me in a way that rid me of all doubt. By the time we got home, night had fallen, but Trachi hadn’t yet returned. I immediately realized that I had behaved badly; in fact, I realized it during the act itself, and still today it pains me. Yet I also know that the fault was not all mine, nor was it Teresa’s. Trachi was with us: we had immersed ourselves in his aura, we had gravitated into his field. I know this because I myself had seen that wherever he passed flowers bloomed before their time, and their pollen flew in his wake as he ran. Trachi didn’t return. Over the following days, we laboriously reconstructed the rest of his story based upon witnesses’ accounts and his tracks. After a night of anxious waiting for all of us, and of secret torment for me, I went to look for him myself at the blacksmith’s. The blacksmith wasn’t at home: he was in the hospital with a cracked skull, and unable to speak. I found his assistant. He told me that Trachi had come at about six o’clock to get shoed. He was silent and sad, but tranquil. Without showing any impatience, he let himself be chained as usual (the uncivilized practice of this particular blacksmith, who, years earlier, had had a bad experience with a skittish horse; we had tried, in vain, to convince him that this precaution was in every way absurd with regard to Trachi). Three of his hooves had already been shoed when a long and violent shudder coursed through him. The blacksmith turned on him with that harsh tone often used on horses; as Trachi’s agitation seemed to increase, the blacksmith struck him with a whip. Trachi appeared to calm down, “but his eyes were rolling around as if he were mad, and he seemed to be hearing voices.” Suddenly, with a furious tug, he pulled the chains from their wall mounts, and the end of one hit the blacksmith in the head, sending him to the floor in a faint. Trachi then threw himself against the door with all his might, head first, arms crossed over his head, and galloped off toward the hills while the four chains, still constricting his legs, whirled around, wounding him repeatedly. “What time did that happen?” I asked, with a disturbing presentiment. The assistant hesitated: it was not yet night, but he couldn’t say precisely. Well, yes, now he remembered: just a few seconds before Trachi pulled the chains from the wall, the time had rung from the bell tower, and the boss had said to him, in dialect so that Trachi wouldn’t understand, “It’s already seven o’clock! If all my clients were as currish as this one . . .” Seven o’clock! It wasn’t difficult, unfortunately, to follow Trachi’s furious flight; even if no one had seen him, there were conspicuous traces of the blood he had lost, of the scrapes the chains had inflicted on tree trunks and rocks by the side of the road. He hadn’t headed toward home, or toward the De Simones’: he had cleared the two-metre wooden fence that surrounded the Chiapasso property, and crossed straight through the vineyards in a blind fury, knocking down stakes and vines, breaking the thick iron wires that supported the vine shoots. He reached the barnyard and found the barn door bolted shut from the outside. He could have opened it easily with his hands; instead, he picked up an old thresher, weighing well over fifty kilos, and hurled it at the door, reducing it to splinters. Only six cows, a calf, some chickens and rabbits were in the barn. Trachi left immediately and, still at a mad gallop, headed toward Baron Caglieris’s estate. It was at least six and a half kilometres away, on the other side of the valley, but Trachi got there in a matter of minutes. He looked for the stable: he found it not with his first blow but only after he had used his hooves and shoulders to knock down several doors. What he did in the stable we know from an eyewitness, a stableboy, who, at the sound of the door shattering, had had the good sense to hide in the hay and from there had seen everything. Trachi hesitated for a moment on the threshold, panting and bloody. The horses, unsettled, tossed their heads, tugging on their halters. Trachi pounced on a three-year-old white mare; in one stroke he severed the chain that bound her to the trough, and dragging her by that chain led her outside. The mare didn’t put up any resistance, which was strange, the stableboy told me, since she had a rather skittish and reluctant character, and was not in heat. They galloped together as far as the river: here Trachi was seen to stop, cup his hands, dip them into the water, and drink repeatedly. They then proceeded side by side into the woods. Yes, I followed their tracks: into those same woods, along that same path, to that same place where Teresa had asked me to take her. And it was right there, for that entire night, that Trachi must have celebrated his monstrous nuptials. I found the ground dug up, broken branches, brown and white horsehair, human hair, and more blood. Not far away, drawn by the sound of her troubled breathing, I found the mare. She lay on her side on the ground, gasping, her noble coat covered with dirt and grass. Hearing my footsteps she lifted her head a little, and followed me with the terrible stare of a spooked horse. She was not wounded but worn out. She gave birth eight months later to a foal: in every way normal, I was told. Here Trachi’s direct traces vanish. But, as some may perhaps remember, over the following days the newspapers reported a strange series of horse-rustlings, all perpetrated with the same technique: a door knocked down, the halter undone or ripped off, the animal (always a mare, and always alone) led into a nearby wood, to be discovered there exhausted. Only once did the abductor seem to meet any resistance: his chance companion of that night was found dying, her neck broken. There were six of these episodes, and they were reported in various places on the peninsula, occurring one after the other from north to south—in Voghera, in Lucca, near Lake Bracciano, in Sulmona, in Cerignola. The last happened near Lecce. Then nothing else. But perhaps this story is linked to a strange report made to the press by a fishing crew from Puglia: just off Corfu, they had come upon “a man riding a dolphin.” This odd apparition swam vigorously toward the east; the sailors shouted at it, at which point the man and the gray rump sank under the water, disappearing from view.

Adam and Eve lived together happily for a few days. Being blind, Adam never had to see the oblong, splotchy birthmark across Eve’s cheek, or her rotated incisor, or the gnawed remnants of her fingernails. And, being deaf, Eve never had to hear how weakly narcissistic Adam was, how selectively impervious to reason and unwonderfully childlike. It was good. They ate apples when they ate and, after a while, they knew it all. Eve grasped the purpose of suffering (there is none), and Adam got his head around free will (a question of terminology). They understood why the new plants were green, and where breezes begin, and what happens when an irresistible force meets an immovable object. Adam saw spots; Eve heard pulses. He saw shapes; she heard tones. And, at a certain point, with no awareness of the incremental process that had led them there, they were fully cured of their blindness and deafness. Cured, too, of their marital felicity. What, each wondered, have I got myself into? First they fought passively, then they despaired privately, then they used the new words ambiguously, then pointedly, then they conceived Cain, then they hurled the early creations, then they argued about who owned the pieces of what had never belonged to anybody. They hollered at each other from the opposite sides of the garden to which they’d retreated: You’re ugly! You’re stupid and wicked! And then the first bruises spread across the first knees, as the first humans whispered the first prayers: Diminish me until I can bear it. But God refused them, or ignored them, or simply didn’t exist enough. Neither Adam nor Eve needed to be right. Nor did they need anything that could be seen or heard in the world. None of the paintings, none of the books, no film or dance or piece of music, not even green nature itself was capable of filling the sieve of aloneness. They needed peace. Adam went looking for Eve one night, as the newly named animals had their first dreams. Eve saw him and approached. “I’m here,” she told him, because his eyes were covered with fig leaves. He reached in front of him and said, “Here I am,” though she didn’t hear him, because her ears were stuffed with rolled-up fig leaves. It worked until it didn’t. There were only apples to eat, so Adam bound his hands with fig-leaf stems and Eve stuffed her mouth with fig leaves. It was good until it wasn’t. He went to bed before he was tired, pulling a fig-leaf quilt up to his nostrils, which were plugged with torn fig leaves. She squinted through a veil of fig leaves into her fig-leaf phone, the only light in the room of the world, and listened to herself listening to him struggle to breathe. They were always inventing new ways not to be aware of the canyon between them. And the unseeing and unhearing God in whose image they were created sighed, “They’re so close.” “Close?” the angel asked. “They’re always inventing new ways not to be aware of the canyon between them, but it’s a canyon of tiny distances: a sentence or a silence here, a closing or an opening of space there, a moment of difficult truth or of difficult generosity. That’s all. They’re always at the threshold.” “Of paradise?” the angel asked, watching the humans reach for each other yet again. “Of peace,” God said, turning the page of a book without edges. “They wouldn’t be so restless if they weren’t so close.”

It had been a very long time since he’d been responsible for another human. Never had he organized travel for himself or anybody. But it was his fault they were all three in the city, and so it fell to him. There was perhaps even something a little exciting about discovering, for the first time in his life, that he was not useless, that his father was wrong, and in fact he was capable. He called Elizabeth first. “I’m in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said. “Wait,” Michael said, hearing a beep on the line. “Let me bring in Marlon.” “The world’s gone crazy!” Elizabeth said. “I can’t even believe what I’m looking at!” “Hi, Marlon,” Michael said. “So—where are we?” Marlon said. “ ‘Where are we?’ ” Elizabeth said. “We’re in a state of terror, that’s where we are.” “We’re all right,” Marlon grumbled. He sounded far away. “We’ll handle it.” Michael could hear Marlon’s TV in the background. It was tuned to the same channel Michael was watching, but only Michael could see the images on the screen replicated simultaneously through his own window, a strange doubling sensation, like when you stand on a stage and look up at yourself on the Jumbotron. Elizabeth and Marlon were staying uptown; normally Michael, too, would be staying uptown—until five days ago he’d almost never set foot below Forty-second Street. Everyone—his brothers and sisters, all his West Coast friends—had warned him not to go downtown. It’s dangerous downtown, it’s always been that way, just stick with what you know, stay at the Carlyle. But because the helipad near the Garden had, for some reason, been out of commission it had been decided he should stay downtown, for reasons of proximity and to avoid traffic. Now Michael looked south and saw a sky darkened with ash. The ash seemed to be moving toward him. Downtown was really so much worse than anyone in L.A. could even begin to imagine. “Some things you can’t handle,” Elizabeth said. “I’m in a state of terror.” “There are no flights allowed,” Michael said, trying to feel capable, filling them in. “No one can charter. Not even the very important people.” “Bullshit!” Marlon said. “You think Weinstein’s not on a plane right now? You think Eisner’s not on a plane?” “Marlon, in case you’ve forgotten,” Elizabeth said, “I am also a Jew. Am I on a plane, Marlon? Am I on a plane?” Marlon groaned. “Oh, for Chrissake. I didn’t mean it that way.” “Well, how the hell did you mean it?” Michael bit his lip. The truth was, these two dear friends of his were both closer friends to him than they were to each other, and there were often these awkward moments when he had to remind them of the love thread that connected all three, which, to Michael, was so obvious; it was woven from a shared suffering, a unique form of suffering, that few people on this earth have ever known or will ever have the chance to experience, but which all of them—Michael, Liz, and Marlon—happened to have undergone to the highest degree possible. As Marlon sometimes said, “The only other guy who knew what this feels like got nailed to a couple of planks of wood!” Sometimes, if Elizabeth wasn’t around, he would add, “By the Jews,” but Michael tried not to linger on these aspects of Marlon, preferring to remember the love thread, for that was all that really mattered, in the end. “I think what Marlon meant—” Michael began, but Marlon cut him off: “Let’s focus here! We’ve got to focus!” “We can’t fly,” Michael said quietly. “I don’t know why, really. That’s just what they’re saying.” “I’m packing,” Elizabeth said, and down the line came the sound of something precious smashing on the floor. “I don’t even know what I’m packing, but I’m packing.” “Let’s be rational about this,” Marlon said. “There’s a lot of car services. I can’t think of any right now. On TV you see them. They’ve got all kinds of names. Hertz? That’s one. There must be others.” “I am truly in a state of terror,” Elizabeth said. “You said that already!” Marlon shouted. “Get ahold of yourself!” “I’ll try and call a car place,” Michael said. “The phones down here are kind of screwy.” On a pad he wrote, Hurts. “Essentials only,” Marlon said, referring to Liz’s packing. “This is not the fucking QE2. This is not fucking cocktail hour with good old Dick up in Saint-Moritz. Essentials.” “It’ll be a big car,” Michael murmured. He hated arguments. “It’ll sure as hell have to be,” Elizabeth said, and Michael knew she was being sarcastic and referring to Marlon’s weight. Marlon knew it, too. The line went silent. Michael bit his lip some more. He could see in the vanity mirror that his lip looked very red, but then he remembered that he had permanently tattooed it that color. “Elizabeth, listen to me,” Marlon said, in his angry but controlled mumble, which gave Michael an inappropriate little thrill; he couldn’t help it, it was just such classic Marlon. “Put that goddam Krupp on your pinkie and let’s get the fuck out of here.” Marlon hung up. Elizabeth started crying. There was a beep on the line. “I should probably take that,” Michael said. At noon, Michael put on his usual disguise and picked up the car in an underground garage near Herald Square. At 12:27 p.m., he pulled up in front of the Carlyle. “Jesus Christ that was fast,” Marlon said. He was sitting on the sidewalk, on one of those portable collapsible chairs you sometimes see people bring along when they camp outside your hotel all night in the hope that you’ll step out onto the balcony and wave to them. He wore a funny bucket hat like a fisherman’s, elasticated sweatpants, and a huge Hawaiian shirt. “I took the superfast river road!” Michael said. He didn’t mean to look too smug about it, given the context, but he couldn’t help but be a little bit proud. Marlon opened a carton he had on his lap and took out a cheeseburger. He eyed the vehicle. “I hear you drive like a maniac.” “I do go fast, Marlon, but I also stay in control. You can trust me, Marlon. I promise I will get us out of here.” Michael felt really sad seeing Marlon like that, eating a cheeseburger on the sidewalk. He was so fat, and his little chair was under a lot of strain. The whole situation looked very precarious. This was also the moment when he noticed that Marlon wasn’t wearing any shoes. “Have you seen Liz?” Michael asked. “What is that hunk of junk, anyway?” Marlon asked. Michael had forgotten. He leaned over and took the manual out of the glove compartment. “A Toyota Camry. It’s all they had.” He was about to add “with a roomy back seat” but thought better of it. “The Japanese are a wise people,” Marlon said. Behind Marlon, the doors of the Carlyle opened and a bellboy emerged walking backward with a tower of Louis Vuitton luggage on a trolley and Elizabeth at his side. She was wearing a lot of diamonds: several necklaces, bracelets up her arms, and a mink stole covered with so many brooches it looked like a pin cushion. “You have got to be kidding me,” Marlon said. A logician? A negotiator? Michael did not usually have much call to think of himself in this way. But now, back on the road and speeding toward Bethlehem, he allowed the thought that people had always overjudged and misunderestimated him and maybe in the end you don’t really know a person until that person is truly tested by a big event, like the apocalypse. Of course, people forgot he’d been raised a Witness. In one way or another, he’d been expecting this day for a long, long time. Still, if anyone had told him, twenty-four hours ago, that he would be able to convince Elizabeth—she who once bought a seat on a plane for a dress so it could meet her in Istanbul—to join him on an escape from New York, in a funky old Japanese car, abandoning five of her Louis Vuitton cases to a city under attack, well, he truly wouldn’t have believed it. Who knew he had such powers of persuasion? He’d never had to persuade anyone of anything, least of all his own genius, which was, of course, a weird childhood gift he’d never asked for and which had proved impossible to give back. Maybe even harder was getting Marlon to agree that they would not stop again for food until they hit Pennsylvania. He leaned forward to see if there were any more enemy combatants in the sky. There were not. He and his friends were really escaping! He had taken control and was making the right decisions for everybody! He looked across at Liz, in the passenger seat: she was calm, at last, but her eyeliner continued to run down her beautiful face. So much eyeliner. Everything Michael knew about eyeliner he’d learned from Liz, but now he realized he had something to teach her on the subject: make it permanent. Tattoo it right around the tear ducts. That way, it never runs. “Am I losing my mind?” Marlon asked. “Or did you say Bethlehem?” Michael adjusted the rearview mirror until he could see Marlon, stretched out on the back seat, reading a book and breaking into the emergency Twinkies, which Michael thought they had all agreed to save till Allentown. “It’s a town in Pennsylvania,” Michael said. “We’ll stop there, eat, and then we’ll go again.” “Are you reading?” Elizabeth asked. “How can you be reading at this moment?” “What should I be doing?” Marlon inquired, somewhat testily. “Shakespeare in the Park?” “I just don’t understand how a person can be reading when their country is under attack. We could all die at any moment.” “If you’d read your Sartre, honey, you’d know that was true at all times in all situations.” Elizabeth scowled and folded her twinkling hands in her lap. “I just don’t see how a person can read at such a time.” “So Jolly Roger is in fact Miserable Roger.”Buy the print » “Well, Liz,” Marlon said, laying it on thick, “let me enlighten you. See, I guess I read because I am what you’d call a reader. Because I am interested in the life of the mind. I admit it. I don’t even have a screening room: no, instead I have a library. Imagine that! Imagine that! Because it happens that my highest calling in life is not to put my fat little hands in a pile of sandy shit outside Grauman’s—” “Oh, brother, here we go.” “Because I actually aspire to comprehend the ways and inclinations of the human—” “These people are trying to kill us! ” Liz screamed, and Michael felt it was really time to intervene. “Not us,” he ventured. “I guess, like, not especially us.” But then a thought came to him. “Elizabeth, you don’t think . . . ?” He had not thought this thought until now—he had been too busy with logistics—but now he began to think it. And he could tell everyone else in the car was thinking it, too. “How would I know?” Liz cried, twisting her biggest ring around her smallest finger. “Maybe! First the financial centers, then the government folks, and then—” “The very important people,” Michael whispered. “Wouldn’t be at all surprised,” Marlon said, turning solemn. “We’re exactly the kinds of sons of bitches who’d make a nice trophy on some crazy motherfucker’s wall.” He sounded scared, at last. And hearing Marlon scared made Michael as scared as he’d been all day. You never want to see your father scared, or your mother cry, and, as far as Michael’s chosen family went, that’s exactly what was happening right now, in this bad Japanese car that did not smell of new leather or new anything. It made him wish he’d tried harder to bring Liza along. On the other hand, maybe that would have been worse. It was almost as if his chosen family were as crushing to his emotional health as his real family! And that thought was really not one that he could allow himself to have on this day of all days—on any day. “We’re all under a lot of strain,” Michael said. His voice was a little wobbly, but he didn’t worry about crying; that didn’t happen easily anymore, not since he’d tattooed around his tear ducts. “This is a very high-stress situation,” he said. He tried to visualize himself as a responsible, humane father, taking his kids on a family road trip. “And we have to try and love each other.” “Thank you, Michael,” Elizabeth said, and for a couple of miles all was peaceful. Then Marlon started in again on the ring. “So these Krupps. They make the weapons that knock off your people, by the millions—and then you buy up their baubles? How does that work?” Elizabeth twisted around in the front seat until she could look Marlon in the eye. “What you don’t understand is that when Richard put this ring on my finger it stopped meaning death and started meaning love.” “Oh, I see. You have the power to turn death into love, just like that.” Elizabeth smiled discreetly at Michael. She squeezed his hand, and he squeezed hers back. “Just like that,” she whispered. Marlon snorted. “Well, good luck to you. But back in the real world a thing is what it is, and thinking don’t make it otherwise.” Elizabeth took a compact from a hidden fold of her stole and reapplied some very red lipstick. “You know,” she told him, “Andy once said it would be very glamorous to be reincarnated as my ring. That’s an actual quotation.” “Sounds about right,” Marlon said, spoiling the moment and sounding pretty sneery, which seemed, to Michael, more than a little unfair, for whatever you thought about Andy personally, as a person, surely if anybody had understood their mutual suffering, if anyone had predicted, prophet-like, the exact length and strength and connective angles and occasionally throttling power of their three-way love thread, it was Andy. “ ‘It is no gift I tender,’ ” Marlon read, very loudly. “ ‘A loan is all I can; But do not scorn the lender; Man gets no more from Man.’ ” “This is not the time for poetry!” Elizabeth shouted. “This is exactly the time for poetry!” Marlon shouted. Just then, Michael remembered that there were a few CDs in the glove box. If he believed in anything, he believed in the healing power of music. He reached over to open it and passed the cases to Elizabeth. “I honestly don’t think we should stop in Ohio,” she said, examining them and then pushing a disk into the slit. “We could take turns driving. We’ll drive through the night.” “I can’t drive when I’m tired,” Marlon said, hitching himself up into a semi-upright position. “Or hungry. Maybe I should do my shift now.” “And I’ll do the night shift,” Michael said, brightening, and he began looking for a place to stop. He could not get over how well he was handling the apocalypse so far. Sure, he was terrified, but, at the same time, oddly elated and—vitally—not especially medicated, for his assistant had all his stuff, and he hadn’t told her he was escaping from New York until they were already on the road, fearing his assistant would try to stop him, as she usually tried to stop him doing the things he most wanted to do. Now he was beyond everyone’s reach. He struggled to think of another moment in his life when he’d felt so free. Was that terrible to say? He had to confess to himself that he felt high, and now tried to identify the source. The adrenaline of self-survival? Mixed with the pity, mixed with the horror? He wondered: is this the feeling people have in war zones and the like? Or—another strange thought—was this in fact what civilian people generally feel every day of their lives, in their sad old rank-smelling Toyota Camrys, sitting in traffic on their way to their workplaces, or camping outside your hotel window, or fainting in front of your dancing image on the Jumbotron? This feeling of no escape from your situation—of forced acceptance? Of no escape even from your escape? “Marlon, did you know that when Liz and I, when we have sleepovers . . . ?” Michael said, a little too quickly, and aware that he was babbling, but unable to stop. “Well, I really don’t sleep at all! Not one wink. Unless you literally knock me out? I’m literally awake all night long. So I’m good to drive all the way to Brentwood. I mean, if we have to.” “Don’t stop till you get enough,” Marlon murmured, and lay back down. “I dreamed a dream in time gone byyyyyy,” Liz sang, along with the CD, “when hope was high and life worth liviiiiiiing. I dreamed that love would never diiiiie! I prayed that God would be for-giviiiiing.” It was the sixth or seventh go-round. They were almost in Harrisburg, having been considerably slowed by two stops at Burger King, one at McDonald’s, and three separate visits to KFC. “If you play that song one more time,” Marlon said, eating a bucket of wings, “I’m going to kill you myself.” The sun was setting on the deep-orange polyvinyl-chloride blinds in their booth, and Michael felt strongly that his new role as the Decider must also include some aspect of spiritual guidance. To that end, he passed Marlon the maple syrup and said, in his high-pitched but newly determined tones, “You know, guys, we’ve driven six hours already and, well, we haven’t talked at all about what happened back there.” They were sitting in an IHOP, just the other side of the Appalachian Mountains, with their mirrored shades on, eating pancakes. Michael had decided—two fast-food joints and eighty miles ago—to leave his usual disguise in the trunk of the car. It had become obvious that it wasn’t necessary, no, not today. And now, with an overwhelming feeling of liberation, he removed his shades, too. For as it was in KFC, in Burger King, and beneath the Golden Arches, so it was in this IHOP: every soul in the place was watching television. Even the waitress who served them watched the television while she served, and spilled a little hot coffee on Michael’s glove, and didn’t say sorry and didn’t clean it up, nor did she notice that Marlon wasn’t wearing shoes—or that he was Marlon—or that resting beside the salt shaker was a diamond as big as the Ritz. “I feel like one minute we were in the Garden, and it was a dream,” Elizabeth said, slowly. “And we were happy, we were celebrating this marvellous boy”—she squeezed Michael’s hand—“celebrating thirty years of your wonderful talent, my dear, and everything was just beautiful. And then—” She hugged her coffee mug with both hands and brought it to her lips. “And then, well, ‘the tigers came’—and now it really feels like the end of days. I know that sounds silly, but that’s how it feels to me. There’s a childlike part of me that just wants to rewind twenty-four hours.” “Make that twenty-four years,” Marlon snapped, but with his classic wry Marlon smile, and all you could do was forgive him. “Scratch that,” he said, hamming it up now. “Make it forty.” Elizabeth pursed her lips and made an adorable comic face. She looked like Amy, in “Little Women,” doing some sly calculation in her head. “Come to think of it,” she said, “forty would work out just swell for me, too.” “Not me,” Michael said, letting a lot of air out of his mouth in a great rush so that he would be brave enough to say what he wanted to say, whether or not it was appropriate, whether or not it was the normal kind of thing you said in abnormal times like these. But perhaps this was his only real advantage, in this moment, over every other person in the IHOP and most of America: nothing normal had ever happened to him, not ever, not in his whole conscious life. And so there was a little part of him that was always prepared for the monstrous, familiar with it, and familiar, too, with its necessary counterbalancing force: love. He reached across the table and took the hands of his two dear friends in his own. “I don’t want to be in any other moment than this one,” he told them. “Here. With you two. No matter how awful it gets. I want to be with you and with all these people. With everyone on earth. In this moment.” They were all silent for a second, and then Marlon raised his still gorgeous eyebrows, sighed, and said, “Hate to break it to you, buddy, but you don’t have much choice about it either way. Looks like no one’s gonna beam us up. Whatever this shit is”—he gestured toward the air in front of them, to the molecules within the air, to time itself—“we’re stuck in it, just like everybody.” “Yes,” Michael said. He was smiling, and it was the presence of a smile—unprecedented in that IHOP, on that day—that, more than anything else, finally attracted the waitress’s attention. “Yes,” he said. “I know.”

The church on Siegfeldstrasse was open to anyone who embarrassed the Republic, and Andreas Wolf was so much of an embarrassment that he actually resided there, in the basement of the rectory, but unlike the others—the true Christian believers, the friends of the Earth, the misfits who defended human rights or didn’t want to fight in World War III—he was no less an embarrassment to himself. For Andreas, the most achievedly totalitarian thing about the Republic was its ridiculousness. It was true that people who tried to cross the death strip were unridiculously shot, but to him this was more like an oddity of geometry, a discontinuity between Eastern flatness and Western three-dimensionality that you had to assume to make the math work. As long as you avoided the border, the worst that could happen was that you’d be spied on and picked up and interrogated, do prison time and have your life wrecked. However inconvenient this might be for the individual, it was leavened by the silliness of the larger apparatus—the risible language of “class enemy” and “counter-revolutionary elements,” the absurd devotion to evidentiary protocol. The authorities would never just dictate your confession or denunciation and force or forge your signature. There had to be photos and recordings, scrupulously referenced dossiers, invocations of democratically enacted laws. The Republic was heartbreakingly German in its striving to be logically consistent and do things right. It was like the most earnest of little boys, trying to impress and outdo its Soviet father. It was even loath to falsify election returns. And mostly out of fear, but maybe also out of pity for that little boy, who believed in socialism the way children in the West believed in a flying Christkind who lit the candles on the Christmas tree and left presents underneath it, the people all went to the polls and voted for the Party. Even the dissidents spoke the language of reform, not overthrow. Everyday life was merely constrained, not tragically terrible. (Olympic bronze was the Berliner Zeitung’s idea of calamity.) And so Andreas, whose embarrassment it was to be the megalomaniacal antithesis of a dictatorship too ridiculous to be worthy of megalomania, kept his distance from the other misfits hiding behind the church’s skirts. They disappointed him aesthetically, they offended his sense of specialness, and they wouldn’t have trusted him anyway. He performed his Siegfeldstrasse ironies privately. Alongside the broad irony of being an atheist dependent on a church was the finer irony of earning his keep as a counsellor of at-risk youth. Had any East German child ever been less at risk than he? Yet here he was, in the basement of the rectory, in group sessions and private meetings, counselling teen-agers on how to overcome promiscuity and alcohol dependency and domestic dysfunction and assume more productive positions in a society he despised. And he was good at what he did—good at getting kids back into school, finding them jobs in the gray economy, connecting them with trustworthy government caseworkers—and so he was himself, ironically, a productive member of that society. His own fall from grace served as his credential with the kids. Their problem was that they took things too seriously (self-destructive behavior was itself a form of self-importance), and his message to them was always, in effect, “Look at me. My father’s on the Central Committee and I’m living in a church basement, but do you ever see me serious?” The message was effective, but it shouldn’t have been, because, in truth, he was scarcely less privileged for living in a church basement. He’d severed all contact with his parents as a twenty-one-year-old, in 1981, but in return for this favor they protected him. He hadn’t even been arrested for the “subversive” prank he’d played on the Republic’s leading literary magazine, the way any of his at-risk charges would have been. But they couldn’t help liking him and responding to him, because he spoke the truth, and they were hungry to hear it. The girls practically lined up outside his office door to drop their pants for him, and this, too, of course, was ironic. He rendered a valuable service to the state, coaxing antisocial elements back into the fold, and was paid for his service in teen pussy. Although his appetite for girls seemed boundless, he prided himself on never having knowingly slept with anyone below the age of consent or anyone who’d been sexually abused. He was skilled at identifying the latter, sometimes by the fecal or septic imagery they used to describe themselves, sometimes merely by a certain telltale way they giggled, and over the years his instincts had led to successful prosecutions. When a girl who’d been abused came on to him, he didn’t walk away, he ran. He had a phobia of associating himself with predation. If his scruples still left an apparent residuum of sickness—a worry about what it meant that he felt compelled to repeat the same pattern with girl after girl—he chalked it up to the sickness of the country he lived in. The Republic had defined him, he continued to exist entirely in relation to it, and apparently one of the roles that it demanded he play was Assibräuteaufreisser. Living in the basement of a rectory, eating bad food out of cans, he felt entitled to the one small luxury that his vestigial privileges afforded. Lacking a bank account, he kept a mental coitus ledger and regularly checked it, making sure that he remembered not only first and last names but the exact order in which he’d had them. His tally stood at fifty-two, late in the winter of 1987, when he made a mistake. The problem was that No. 53, a small redhead, Petra, temporarily residing with her unemployable father in a cold-water Prenzlauer Berg squat, was, like her father, extremely religious. Interestingly, this in no way dampened her hots for Andreas (or his for her), but it did mean that she considered sex in a church disrespectful to God. Andreas tried to relieve her of this superstition but succeeded only in making her very agitated about the state of his soul, and he saw that he risked losing her altogether if he failed to keep his soul in play. Once he’d set his mind on sealing a deal, he could think of nothing else, and since he had no close friend whose flat he could borrow and no money for a hotel room, and since the weather on the crucial night was well below freezing, the only way he could think to gain access to Petra’s pants was to board the S-Bahn with her and take her out to his parents’ dacha on the Müggelsee. His parents rarely used it in the winter and never during the work week. Buy the print » The dacha, walkable from the train station, was set on a large plot of piney land that sloped gently to the lakeshore. By feel, in the dark, Andreas located the key hanging from the customary eave. When he went inside with Petra and turned on a light, he was disoriented to find the living room outfitted with the faux-Danish furniture of his childhood in the city. He hadn’t been out to the dacha in six years. His mother had apparently redecorated the city flat in the meantime. “Whose house is this?” Petra said, impressed with the amenities. “Never mind that.” He turned on the electric furnace and led Petra down the hall to the room that had once been his. “Can I take a bath?” she said. “You don’t have to on my account.” “It’s been four days.” He didn’t want to deal with a damp bath towel; it would have to be dried and folded before they left. But it was important to put the girl and her desires first. “It’s fine,” he assured her pleasantly. “Take a bath.” He sat down on his old bed and heard her lock the bathroom door behind her. In the weeks that followed, the click of this lock became the seed of his paranoia: why had she locked the door when he was the only other person in the house? But maybe it was just his bad luck that she was immobilized in the bathtub with the water still running, the flow in the pipes loud enough to cover the sound of an approaching vehicle and footsteps, when he heard a pounding on the front door and then a barking: “Volkspolizei!” The water abruptly stopped. Andreas thought about making a run for it, but he was trapped by the fact that Petra was in the tub. Reluctantly, he heaved himself off the bed and went and opened the front door. Two VoPos were backlit by the flashers and headlights of their cruiser. “Yes?” he said. “Identification, please.” “What’s this about?” “Your identification, please.” If the policemen had had tails, they wouldn’t have been wagging; if they’d had pointed ears, they would have been flattened back. The senior officer frowned at the little blue book and handed it to the junior, who carried it back toward the cruiser. “Do you have permission to be here?” “In a certain sense.” “Are you alone?” “As you find me.” Andreas beckoned politely. “Would you care to come in?” “I’ll need to use the telephone.” “Of course.” The officer entered circumspectly. Andreas guessed that he was more wary of the house’s owners than of any armed thugs who might be lurking in it. “This is my parents’ place,” he explained. “We’re acquainted with the Under-Secretary. We’re not acquainted with you. No one has permission to be in this house tonight.” “I’ve been here for fifteen minutes. Your vigilance is commendable.” “We saw the lights.” “Really highly commendable.” From the bathroom came a single plink of falling water; in hindsight, Andreas found it noteworthy that the officer had shown no interest in the bathroom. The man simply paged through a shabby black notebook, found a number, and dialled it on the living-room extension. “Mr. Under-Secretary?” The officer identified himself and tersely reported the presence of an intruder who claimed to be a relative. Then he said yes several times. “Tell him I’d like to speak to him,” Andreas said. The officer made a silencing gesture. “I want to talk to him.” “Of course, right away,” the officer said to the Under-Secretary. Andreas tried to grab the receiver. The officer shoved him in the chest and knocked him to the floor. “No, he’s trying to take the phone. . . . That’s right. . . . Yes, of course. I’ll tell him. . . . Understood, Mr. Under-Secretary.” The officer hung up the phone and looked down at Andreas. “You’re to leave immediately and never come back.” “Got it.” “If you ever come back, there will be consequences. The Under-Secretary wanted to make sure you understood that. But me personally? I hope you come back, and I hope I’m on duty when you do.” When the police were gone, Andreas knocked on the bathroom door and told Petra to turn off the light and wait for him. He turned off the other lights and went out into the night, heading toward the train station. At the first bend in the lane, he saw the cruiser parked and gave the officers a little wave. At the next bend, he ducked behind some pine trees to wait until they drove away. The evening had been damaging, and he wasn’t about to waste it. But when he was finally able to creep back into the dacha and found Petra cowering on his boyhood bed, mewling with fear of the police, he was too enraged at his humiliation to care about her pleasure. He ordered her to do this and do that, in the dark, and it ended with her weeping and saying she hated him—a feeling that, by that point, he entirely reciprocated. He never saw her again. He spent the following spring and summer depressed, and therefore all the more preoccupied with sex, but since he suddenly distrusted both himself and girls he denied himself the relief of it. Though he was jeopardizing the best job an East German in his position could hope to find, he lay on his bed all day and read British novels, detective and otherwise, forbidden and otherwise. He was seven months celibate on the October afternoon when the church’s young “vicar” came to see him about the girl in the sanctuary. The vicar wore all the vestments of renegade-church cliché—full beard, check; faded jean jacket, check; mod copper crucifix, check—but was usefully insecure in the face of Andreas’s superior street experience. “I first noticed her two weeks ago,” he said, sitting down on the floor. He seemed to have read in some book that sitting on the floor established rapport and conveyed Christlike humility. “Sometimes she stays in the sanctuary for an hour, sometimes until midnight. Not praying, just doing her homework. I finally asked if we could help her. She looked scared and said she was sorry—she’d thought she was allowed to be here. I told her the church is always open to anyone in need. I wanted to start a conversation, but all she wanted was to hear that she wasn’t breaking any rules.” “So?” “Well, you are the youth counsellor.” “The sanctuary isn’t exactly on my beat.” “It’s understandable that you’re burned out. We haven’t minded your taking some time for yourself.” “I appreciate it.” “I’m concerned about the girl, though. I talked to her again yesterday and asked if she was in trouble—my fear is that she’s been abused. She speaks so softly it’s hard to understand her, but she seemed to be saying that the authorities are already aware of her, and so she can’t go to them. Apparently she’s here because she has nowhere else to go.” “Aren’t we all.” “She might say more to you than to me.” “How old is she?” “Young. Fifteen, sixteen. Also extraordinarily pretty.” Underage, abused, and pretty. Andreas sighed. “You’ll need to come out of your room at some point,” the vicar suggested. “Here comes the tickle monster!”Buy the print » When Andreas went up to the sanctuary and saw the girl in the next-to-rear pew, he immediately experienced her beauty as an unwelcome complication, a specificity that distracted him from the universal female body part that had interested him for so long. She was dark-haired and dark-eyed, unrebelliously dressed, and was sitting with a Free German Youth erectness of posture, a textbook open in her lap. She looked like a good girl, the sort he never saw in the basement. She didn’t raise her head as he approached. “Will you talk to me?” he said. She shook her head. “You talked to the vicar.” “Only for a minute,” she murmured. “O.K. Why don’t I sit down behind you, where you don’t have to see me. And then, if you—” “Please don’t do that.” “All right. I’ll stay in sight.” He took the pew in front of her. “I’m Andreas. I’m a counsellor here. Will you tell me your name?” She shook her head. “Are you here to pray?” She smirked. “Is there a God?” “No, of course not. Where would you get an idea like that?” “Somebody built this church.” “Somebody was thinking wishfully.” She raised her head, as if he’d slightly interested her. “Aren’t you afraid of getting in trouble?” “With who? The minister? God’s only a word he uses against the state. Nothing in this country exists except in reference to the state.” “You shouldn’t say things like that.” “I’m only saying what the state itself says.” He looked down at her legs, which were of a piece with the rest of her. “Are you very afraid of getting in trouble?” he said. She shook her head. “Afraid of getting someone else in trouble, then. Is that it?” “I come here because this is nowhere. It’s nice to be nowhere for a while.” “Nowhere is more nowhere than this place, I agree.” She smiled faintly. “When you look in the mirror,” he said, “what do you see? Someone pretty?” “I don’t look in mirrors.” “What would you see if you did?” “Nothing good.” “Something bad? Something harmful?” She shrugged. “Why didn’t you want me to sit down behind you?” “I like to see who I’m talking to.” “So we are talking. You were only pretending that you weren’t going to talk to me. You were being self-dramatizing—playing games.” Sudden honest confrontation was one of his counselling tricks. That he was sick of these tricks didn’t mean they didn’t still work. “I already know I’m bad,” the girl said. “You don’t have to explain it to me.” “But it must be hard for you that people don’t know how bad you are. They simply don’t believe a girl so pretty can be so bad inside. It must be hard for you to respect people.” “I have friends.” “So did I when I was your age. But it doesn’t help, does it? It’s actually worse that people like me. They think I’m funny; they think I’m attractive. Only I know how bad I am inside. I’m extremely bad and extremely important. In fact, I’m the most important person in the country.” It was encouraging to see her sneer like an adolescent. “You’re not important.” “Oh, but I am. You just don’t know it. But you do know what it’s like to be important, don’t you. You’re very important yourself. Everyone pays attention to you, everyone wants to be near you because you’re beautiful, and then you harm them. You have to go hide in a church to give the world a rest from you.” “I wish you’d leave me alone.” “Who are you harming? Just say it.” The girl lowered her head. “You can tell me,” he said. “I’m an old harmer myself.” She shivered a little and knit her fingers together in her lap. From outside, the rumble of a truck and the sharp clank of a bad gearbox entered the sanctuary and lingered in the air, which smelled of charred candlewick and tarnished brass. “My mother,” the girl murmured. The hatred in her voice was hard to square with the notion that she cared that she was doing harm. Andreas knew enough about abuse to guess what this meant. “Where’s your father?” he asked gently. “Dead.” “And your mother remarried.” She nodded. “Is she not at home?” “She’s a night nurse at the hospital.” He winced; he got the picture. “You’re safe here,” he said. “This really is nowhere. There’s no one you can hurt here. It’s all right if you tell me your name. It doesn’t matter.” “I’m Annagret,” the girl said. Their initial conversation was analogous, in its swiftness and directness, to his seductions, but in spirit it was just the opposite. Annagret’s beauty was so striking, so far outside the norm, that it seemed like a pointed affront to the Republic of Bad Taste. It shouldn’t have existed; it upset the orderly universe at whose center he’d always placed himself; it frightened him. He was twenty-seven years old, and (unless you counted his mother when he was little) he’d never been in love, because he had yet to meet—had stopped even trying to imagine—a girl who was worth it. But here one was. He saw her again on each of the following three evenings. He felt bad about looking forward to it just because she was so pretty, but there was nothing he could do about that. On the second night, to deepen her trust in him, he made a point of telling her that he’d slept with dozens of girls at the church. “It was a kind of addiction,” he said, “but I had strict limits. I need you to believe that you personally are way outside all of them.” This was the truth but also, deep down, a total lie, and Annagret called him on it. “Everyone thinks they have strict limits,” she said, “until they cross them.” “Let me be the person who proves to you that some limits really are strict.” “People say this church is a hangout for people with no morality. I didn’t see how that could be true—after all, it’s a church. But now you’re telling me it is true.” “I’m sorry to be the one to disillusion you.” “There’s something wrong with this country.” “I couldn’t agree more.” “The Judo Club was bad enough. But to hear it’s in the church . . .” Annagret had an older sister, Tanja, who’d excelled at judo as an Oberschule student. Both sisters were university-tracked, by virtue of their test scores and their working-class credentials, but Tanja was boy-crazy and overdid the sports thing and ended up working as a secretary after her Abitur, spending all her free time either dancing at clubs or training and coaching at the sports center. Annagret was seven years younger and not as athletic as her sister, but they were a judo family and she’d joined the local club when she was twelve. “It boils down to which I dislike more: ironing shirts or non-iron shirts.”Buy the print » A regular at the sports center was a handsome older guy, Horst, who was maybe thirty and owned a large motorcycle. He came to the center mostly to maintain his impressive buffness, but he also played handball and liked to watch the advanced judo students sparring, and by and by Tanja managed to score a date with him and his bike. This led to a second date and then a third, at which point a misfortune occurred: Horst met their mother. After that, instead of taking Tanja out on his bike, he wanted to see her at home, in their tiny shitty flat, with Annagret and the mother. Inwardly, the mother was a hard and disappointed person, the widow of a truck mechanic who’d died wretchedly of a brain tumor, but outwardly she was thirty-eight and pretty—not only prettier than Tanja but also closer in age to Horst. Ever since Tanja had failed her by not pursuing her education, the two of them had quarrelled about everything imaginable, which now included Horst, who the mother thought was too old for Tanja. When it became evident that Horst preferred her to Tanja, she didn’t see how it was her fault. Annagret was luckily not at home on the fateful afternoon when Tanja stood up and said she needed air and asked Horst to take her out on his bike. Horst said there was a painful matter that the three of them needed to discuss. There were better ways for him to have handled the situation, but probably no good way. Tanja slammed the door behind her and didn’t return for three days. As soon as she could, she relocated to Leipzig. After Horst and Annagret’s mother were married, the three of them moved to a notably roomy flat, where Annagret had a bedroom of her own. She felt bad for Tanja and disapproved of her mother, but her stepfather fascinated her. His job, as a labor-collective leader at the city’s largest power plant, was good but not quite good enough to explain the way he had of making things happen: the bike, the roomy flat, the oranges and Brazil nuts and Michael Jackson records he sometimes brought home. From her description of Horst, Andreas had the impression that he was one of those people whose self-love is untempered by shame and thus fully contagious. Certainly Annagret liked to be around him. He gave her rides on his motorcycle to and from the sports center. He taught her how to ride it by herself, in a parking lot. She tried to teach him some judo in return, but his upper body was so disproportionately developed that he was bad at falling. In the evening, after her mother left for her night shift, Annagret explained the extra-credit work she was doing in the hope of attending an Erweiterte Oberschule; she was impressed by Horst’s quick comprehension and told him that he should have gone to an EOS himself. Before long, she considered him one of her best friends. As a bonus, this pleased her mother, who seemed increasingly worn out by her nursing job and was grateful that her husband and daughter got along well. Tanja may have been lost to her, but Annagret was the good girl, her mother’s hope for the future of the family. And then one night, in the notably roomy flat, Horst came tapping on her bedroom door before she turned off her light. “Are you decent?” he said playfully. “I’m in my pajamas,” she said. He came in and pulled up a chair by her bed. He had a very large head—Annagret couldn’t explain it to Andreas, but the largeness of Horst’s head seemed to her the reason that everything always worked out to his advantage. Oh, he has such a splendid head—let’s just give him what he wants. Something like that. On this particular night, his large head was flushed from drinking. “I’m sorry if I smell like beer,” he said. “I wouldn’t be able to smell it if I could have one, too.” “You sound like you know quite a bit about beer drinking.” “Oh, it’s just what they say.” “You could have a beer if you stopped training, but you won’t stop training, so you can’t have a beer.” She liked the joking way they had together. “But you train, and you drink beer.” “I only drank so much tonight because I have something serious to say to you.” She saw that something, indeed, was different in his face tonight. A kind of ill-controlled anguish in his eyes. Also, his hands were shaking. “What is it?” she said, worried. “Can you keep a secret?” he said. “I don’t know.” “Well, you have to, because you’re the only person I can tell, and if you don’t keep the secret we’re all in trouble.” She thought about this. “Why do you have to tell me?” “Because it concerns you. It’s about your mother. Will you keep a secret?” “I can try.” Horst took a large breath that came out beer-smelling. “Your mother is a drug addict,” he said. “I married a drug addict. She steals narcotics from the hospital and uses them when she’s there and also when she’s at home. Did you know that?” “No,” Annagret said. But she was inclined to believe it. More and more often lately, there was something dulled about her mother. “She’s very expert at pilfering,” Horst said. “No one at the hospital suspects.” “We need to talk to her about it and tell her to stop.” “Addicts don’t stop without treatment. If she asks for treatment, the authorities will know she was stealing.” “But they’ll be happy that she’s being honest and trying to get better.” “Well, unfortunately, there’s another matter. An even bigger secret. Not even your mother knows this secret. Can I tell it to you?” He was one of her best friends, and so, after a hesitation, she said yes. “I took an oath that I would never tell anyone,” Horst said. “I’m breaking that oath by telling you. For some years now, I’ve worked informally for the Ministry of State Security. I’m a well-trusted unofficial collaborator. There’s an officer I meet with from time to time. I pass along information about my workers and especially about my superiors. This is necessary because the power plant is vital to our national security. I’m very fortunate to have a good relationship with the Ministry. You and your mother are very fortunate that I do. But do you understand what this means?” “No.” “We owe our privileges to the Ministry. How do you think my officer will feel if he learns that my wife is a thief and a drug addict? He’ll think I’m not trustworthy. We could lose this flat, and I could lose my position.” “But you could just tell the officer the truth about Mother. It’s not your fault.” “If I tell him, your mother will lose her job. She’ll probably go to prison. Is that what you want?” “Of course not.” “So we have to keep everything secret.” “But now I wish I didn’t know! Why did I have to know?” “Because you need to help me keep the secret. Your mother betrayed us by breaking the law. You and I are the family now. She is the threat to it. We need to make sure she doesn’t destroy it.” “We have to try to help her.” “It was offensive to people who haven’t turned eight.”Buy the print » “You matter more to me than she does now. You are the woman in my life. See here.” He put a hand on her belly and splayed his fingers. “You’ve become a woman.” The hand on her belly frightened her, but not as much as what he’d told her. “A very beautiful woman,” he added huskily. “I’m feeling ticklish.” He closed his eyes and didn’t take away his hand. “Everything has to be secret,” he said. “I can protect you, but you have to trust me.” “Can’t we just tell Mother?” “No. One thing will lead to another, and she’ll end up in jail. We’re safer if she steals and takes drugs—she’s very good at not getting caught.” “But if you tell her you work for the Ministry, she’ll understand why she has to stop.” “I don’t trust her. She’s betrayed us already. I have to trust you instead.” She felt she might cry soon; her breaths were coming faster. “You shouldn’t put your hand on me,” she said. “It feels wrong.” “Maybe, yes, wrong, a little bit, considering our age difference.” He nodded his big head. “But look how much I trust you. We can do something that’s maybe a little bit wrong because I know you won’t tell anyone.” “I might tell someone.” “No. You’d have to expose our secrets, and you can’t do that.” “Oh, I wish you hadn’t told me anything.” “But I did. I had to. And now we have secrets together. Just you and me. Can I trust you?” Her eyes filled. “I don’t know.” “Tell me a secret of your own. Then I’ll know I can trust you.” “I don’t have any secrets.” “Then show me something secret. What’s the most secret thing you can show me?” The hand on her belly inched downward, and her heart began to hammer. “Is it this?” he said. “Is this your most secret thing?” “I don’t know,” she whimpered. “It’s all right. You don’t have to show me. It’s enough that you let me feel it.” Through his hand, she could feel his whole body relax. “I trust you now.” For Annagret, the terrible thing was that she’d liked what followed, at least for a while. For a while, it was merely like a closer form of friendship. They still joked together, she still told him everything about her days at school, they still went riding together and trained at the sports club. It was ordinary life but with a secret, an extremely grownup secret thing that happened after she put on her pajamas and went to bed. While he touched her, he kept saying how beautiful she was, what perfect beauty. And because, for a while, he didn’t touch her with any part of himself except his hand, she felt as if she herself were to blame, as if the whole thing had actually been her idea, as if she’d done this with her beauty and the only way to make it stop was to submit to it and experience release. She hated her body for wanting release even more than she hated it for its supposed beauty, but somehow the hatred made it all the more urgent. She wanted him to kiss her. She wanted him to need her. She was very bad. And maybe it made sense that she was very bad, being the daughter of a drug addict. She’d casually asked her mother if she was ever tempted to take the drugs she gave her patients. Every once in a while, yes, her mother had answered smoothly, if a little bit of something at the hospital was left unused, she or one of the other nurses might take it to calm their nerves, but it didn’t mean that the person was an addict. Annagret hadn’t said anything about anyone being an addict. For Andreas, the terrible thing was how much the stepfather’s pussycentrism reminded him of his own. He felt only somewhat less implicated when Annagret went on to tell him that her weeks of being touched had been merely a prelude to Horst’s unzipping of his pants. It was bound to happen sometime, and yet it broke the spell that she’d been under; it introduced a third party to their secret. She didn’t like this third party. She realized that it must have been spying on the two of them all along, biding its time, manipulating them like a case officer. She didn’t want to see it, didn’t want it near her, and when it tried to assert its authority she became afraid of being at home at night. But what could she do? The pecker knew her secrets. It knew that, if only for a while, she’d looked forward to being tampered with. She’d become its unofficial collaborator; she’d tacitly sworn an oath. She couldn’t go to the authorities, because Horst would tell them about the drugs and they’d put her mother in jail and leave her alone with the pecker. And maybe her mother deserved to be jailed, but not if it meant that Annagret remained at home and kept harming her. She wondered if her mother took narcotics so as not to face up to which body the pecker really wanted. This was what came out on the fourth evening of Andreas’s counselling. When Annagret had finished her confession, in the chill of the sanctuary, she began to weep. Seeing someone so beautiful weeping, seeing her press her fists to her eyes like an infant, Andreas was gripped by an unfamiliar physical sensation. He was such a laugher, such an ironist, such an artist of unseriousness, that he didn’t even recognize what was happening to him: he, too, was starting to cry. Annagret’s beauty had broken something open in him. He felt that he was just like her. And so he was also crying because he loved her, and because he couldn’t have her. “Can you help me?” she whispered. “I don’t know.” “Why did I tell you so much if you can’t help me? Why did you keep asking me questions? You acted like you could help me.” He shook his head and said nothing. She put a hand on his shoulder, very lightly, but even a light touch from her was terrible. He bowed forward, shaking with sobs. “I’m so sad for you.” “But now you see what I mean. I cause harm.” “No.” “Maybe I should just be his girlfriend. Make him divorce my mother and be his girlfriend.” “No.” He pulled himself together and wiped his face. “No, he’s a sick fucker. I know it because I’m a little bit sick myself. I can extrapolate.” “You might have done the same thing he did. . . .” “Never. I swear to you. I’m like you, not him.” “But . . . if you’re a little sick and you’re like me, it means that I must be a little bit sick.” “That’s not what I meant.” “When your only tool is a trebuchet, every problem looks like a siege.”Buy the print » “You’re right, though. I should go home and be his girlfriend. Since I’m so sick. Thank you for your help, Mr. Counsellor.” He took her by the shoulders and made her look at him. There was nothing but distrust in her eyes now. “I want to be your friend,” he said. “We all know where being friends goes.” “You’re wrong. Stay here, and let’s think. Be my friend.” She pulled away from him and crossed her arms tightly. “We can go directly to the Stasi,” he said. “He broke his oath to them. The minute they think he might embarrass them, they’ll drop him like a hot potato. As far as they’re concerned, he’s just some bottom-tier collaborator—he’s nobody.” “No,” she said. “They’ll think I’m lying. I didn’t tell you everything I did—it’s too embarrassing. I did things to interest him.” “It doesn’t matter. You’re fifteen. In the eyes of the law, you have no responsibility. Unless he’s very stupid, he’s got to be scared out of his mind right now. You’ve got all the power.” “But, even if they believe me, everybody’s life is ruined, including mine. I won’t have a home. I won’t be able to go to university. Even my sister will hate me. I think it’s better if I just give him what he wants until I’m old enough to move away.” “That’s what you want.” She shook her head. “I wouldn’t be here if that were what I wanted. But now I see that nobody can help me.” Andreas didn’t know what to say. What he wanted was for her to come and live in the basement of the rectory with him. He could protect her, home-school her, practice English with her, train her as a counsellor for at-risk youth, and be her friend, the way King Lear imagined being friends with Cordelia, following the news of the court from a distance, laughing at who was in, who was out. Maybe in time they’d be a couple, the couple in the basement, leading their own private life. “We can find room for you here,” he said. She shook her head again. “He’s already upset that I don’t come home until midnight. He thinks I’m out with boys. If I didn’t come home at all, he’d turn my mother in.” “He said that to you?” “He’s an evil person. For a long time, I thought the opposite, but not anymore. Now everything he says to me is some kind of threat. He’s not going to stop until he gets everything he wants.” A different sensation, not tears, a wave of hatred, came over Andreas. “I can kill him,” he said. “That’s not what I meant by helping me.” “Somebody’s life has to be ruined,” he said, pursuing the logic of his hatred. “Why not his and mine? I’m already in a kind of prison. The food can’t be any worse in a real prison. I can read books at state expense. You can go to school and help your mother with her problem.” She made a derisive sound. “That’s a good plan. Trying to kill a bodybuilder.” “Obviously I wouldn’t warn him in advance.” She looked at him as if he couldn’t possibly be serious. Until that moment, she would have been right. Levity was his métier. But it was harder to see the ridiculous side of the casual destruction of lives in the Republic when the life in question was Annagret’s. He was falling in love with this girl, and there was nothing he could do with the feeling, no way to act on it, no way to make her believe that she should trust him. She must have seen some of this in his face, because her own expression changed. “You can’t kill him,” she said quietly. “He’s just very sick. Everyone in my family is sick, everyone I touch is sick, including me. I just need help.” “There is no help for you in this country.” “That can’t be right.” “It’s the truth.” She stared for a while at the pews in front of them or at the cross behind the altar, forlorn and murkily lit. After a time, her breaths became quicker and sharper. “I wouldn’t cry if he died,” she said. “But I should be the one to do it, and I could never do it. Never, never. I’d sooner be his girlfriend.” On more careful reflection, Andreas didn’t really want to kill Horst, either. He could imagine surviving prison, but the label murderer didn’t accord with his self-image. The label would follow him forever, he wouldn’t be able to like himself as much as he did now, and neither would other people. It was all very well to be an Assibräuteaufreisser, a troller for sex among the antisocial—the label was appropriately ridiculous. But murderer was not. “So,” Annagret said, standing up. “It’s nice of you to offer. It was nice of you to listen to my story and not be too disgusted.” “Wait, though,” he said, because another thought had occurred to him: if she were his accomplice, he might not automatically be caught, and, even if he were caught, her beauty and his love for her would adhere to what the two of them had done. He wouldn’t simply be a murderer; he’d be the person who’d eliminated the molester of this singular girl. “Do you trust me?” he said. “I like that I can talk to you. I don’t think you’re going to tell anyone my secrets.” She paused. “I don’t want to be your girlfriend,” she added, “if that’s what you’re asking. I don’t want to be anyone’s girlfriend. I just want to be normal again.” “That’s not going to happen.” Her expression became desolate. The natural thing would have been to put his arms around her and console her, but nothing about their situation was natural. He felt completely powerless—another new sensation and one he didn’t like one bit. He figured that she was about to walk away and never come back. But instead she drew a stabilizing breath and said, without looking at him, “How would you do it?” In a low, dull voice, as if in a trance, he told her how. She had to stop coming to the church and go home and lie to Horst. She had to say that she’d been going to a church to sit by herself and pray and seek God’s guidance, and that her mind was clearer now. She was ready to give herself fully to Horst, but she couldn’t do it at home, out of respect for her mother. She knew a better place, a romantic place, a safe place where some of her friends went on weekends to drink beer and make out. If he cared about her feelings, he would take her there. “You know a place like that?” “She’ll be back.”Buy the print » “I do,” Andreas said. “Why would you do this for me?” “Who better to do it for? You deserve a good life. I’m willing to take a risk for that.” “It’s not a risk. It’s guaranteed—they’d definitely catch you.” “O.K., thought experiment: if it were guaranteed they wouldn’t, would you let me do it?” “I’m the one who should be killed. I’ve been doing something terrible to my mother.” He sighed. “I like you a lot, Annagret. I’m not so fond of the self-dramatizing, though.” This was the right thing to have said—he saw it immediately. Not a full-bore burning look from her but unmistakably a spark of fire. He almost resented his loins for warming at the sight; he didn’t want this to be just another seduction. He wanted her to be the way out of the wasteland of seduction he’d been living in. “I could never do it,” she said, turning away from him. “Sure. We’re just talking.” “You self-dramatize, too. You said you were the most important person in the country.” He could have pointed out that such a ridiculous claim had to be ironic, but he saw that this was only half true. Irony was slippery; the sincerity of Annagret was firm. “You’re right,” he said gratefully. “I self-dramatize, too. It’s another way the two of us are alike.” She gave a petulant shrug. “But since we’re only talking, how well do you think you could ride a motorbike?” “I just want to be normal again. I don’t want to be like you.” “O.K. We’ll try to make you normal again. But it would help if you could ride his motorbike. I’ve never been on one myself.” “Riding it is sort of like judo,” she said. “You try to go with it, not against it.” Sweet judo girl. She continued like this, closing the door on him and then opening it a little, rejecting possibilities that she then turned around and allowed, until it got so late that she had to go home. They agreed that there was no point in her returning to the church unless she was ready to act on their plan or move into the basement. These were the only two ideas either of them had. Once she stopped coming to the church, Andreas had no way to communicate with her. For the following six afternoons, he went up to the sanctuary and waited until dinnertime. He was pretty sure he’d never see her again. She was just a schoolgirl, she didn’t care about him, or at least not enough, and she didn’t hate her stepfather as murderously as he did. She would lose her nerve—either go alone to the Stasi or submit to worse abuse. As the afternoons passed, Andreas felt some relief at the prospect. In terms of having an experience, seriously contemplating a murder was almost as good as going through with it, and it had the added benefit of not entailing risk. Between prison and no prison, no prison was clearly preferable. What tormented him was the thought that he wouldn’t lay eyes on Annagret again. He pictured her studiously practicing her throws at the Judo Club, being the good girl, and felt very sorry for himself. He refused to picture what might be happening to her at home at night. She showed up on the seventh afternoon, looking pale and starved and wearing the same ugly rain jacket that half the teen-agers in the Republic were wearing. A nasty cold drizzle was falling on Siegfeldstrasse. She took the rearmost pew and bowed her head and kneaded her pasty, bitten hands. Seeing her again, after a week of merely imagining her, Andreas was overwhelmed by the contrast between love and lust. Love turned out to be soul-crippling, stomach-turning, weirdly claustrophobic: a sense of endlessness bottled up inside him, endless weight, endless potential, with only the small outlet of a shivering pale girl in a bad rain jacket to escape through. Touching her was the farthest thing from his mind. The impulse was to throw himself at her feet. He sat down not very close to her. For a long time, for several minutes, they didn’t speak. Love altered the way he perceived her uneven mouth-breathing and her trembling hands—again the disparity between the largeness of her mattering and the ordinariness of the sounds she made, the everydayness of her schoolgirl fingers. He had the strange thought that it was wrong, wrong as in evil, to think of killing a man who, in however sick a way, was also in love with her, that he instead ought to have compassion for that man. “So I have to be at the Judo Club,” she said finally. “I can’t stay long.” “It’s good to see you,” he said. Love made this feel like the most remarkably true statement he’d ever made. “So just tell me what to do.” “Maybe now is not a good time. Maybe you want to come back some other day.” She shook her head, and some of her hair fell over her face. She didn’t push it back. “Just tell me what to do.” “Shit,” he said honestly. “I’m as scared as you are.” “Not possible.” “Why not just run away? Come and live here. We’ll find a room for you.” She began to shiver more violently. “If you won’t help me, I’ll do it myself. You think you’re bad, but I’m the bad one.” “No, here, here.” He took her shaking hands in his own. They were icy and so ordinary, so ordinary; he loved them. “You’re a very good person. You’re just in a bad dream.” She turned her face to him, and through her hair he saw the burning look. “Will you help me out of it?” “It’s what you want?” “You said you’d help me.” Could anyone be worth it? He did wonder, but he set down her hands and took a map that he’d drawn from his jacket pocket. “This is where the house is,” he said. “You’ll need to take the S-Bahn out there by yourself first, so you’ll know exactly where you’re going. Do it after dark and watch out for cops. When you go back there on the motorcycle, have him cut the lights at the last corner, and then go all the way back behind the house. The driveway curves around behind. And then make sure you take your helmets off. What night are we talking about?” “Thursday.” “What time does your mother’s shift start?” “Ten o’clock.” “Don’t go home for dinner. Tell him you’ll meet him by his bike at nine-thirty. You don’t want anyone to see you leaving the building with him.” “O.K. Where will you be?” “Don’t worry about that. Just head for the back door. Everything will be the way we talked about.” “I’ll call you back, Jake—my secretary just crept into my office like a stray cat crossing the tracks of the midnight train to Murdertown.”Buy the print » She convulsed a little, as if she might retch, but she mastered herself and put the map in her jacket pocket. “Is that all?” she said. “You suggested it to him. The date.” She nodded quickly. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “Is that all?” “Just one other thing. Will you look at me?” She remained hunched over, like a guilty dog, but she turned her head. “You have to be honest with me,” he said. “Are you doing this because I want it or because you want it?” “What does it matter?” “A lot. Everything.” She looked down at her lap again. “I just want it to be over. Either way.” “You know we won’t be able to see each other for a very long time, whichever way it goes. No contact of any kind.” “That’s almost better.” “Think about it, though. If you came here instead, we could see each other every day.” “I don’t think that’s better.” He looked up at the stained ceiling of the sanctuary and considered what a cosmic joke it was that the first person his heart had freely chosen was someone he not only couldn’t have but wouldn’t even be allowed to see. And yet he felt all right about it. His powerlessness itself was sweet. Who would have guessed that? Various clichés about love, stupid adages and song lyrics, flashed through his head. “I’m late for judo,” Annagret said. “I have to go.” He closed his eyes so that he didn’t have to see her leave. The drizzle persisted through the week, with intermittent harder showers, and for three nights he obsessed about the rain, wondering whether it was good or bad. When he managed to sleep for a few minutes, he had dreams that he ordinarily would have found laughably obvious—a body not in the place where he’d left it, feet protruding from under his bed when people entered his room—but which under the circumstances were true nightmares, of the sort from which he ordinarily would have been relieved to awaken. But being awake was even worse now. He considered the plus side of rain: no moon. And the minus side: deep footprints and tire tracks. The plus side: easy digging and slippery stairs. And the minus side: slippery stairs. The plus side: cleansing. And the minus side: mud everywhere. . . . The anxiety had a life of its own; it churned and churned. The only thought that brought relief was that Annagret was unquestionably suffering even more. The relief was to feel connected to her. The relief was love, the astonishment of experiencing her distress more keenly than he experienced his own, of caring more about her than about himself. As long as he could hold that thought and exist within it, he could halfway breathe. At three-thirty on Thursday afternoon he packed a knapsack with a hunk of bread, a pair of gloves, a roll of piano wire, and an extra pair of pants. He had the feeling that he’d slept not at all the previous night, but maybe he had, maybe a little bit. He left the rectory basement by the back stairs and emerged into the courtyard, where a light rain was falling. Earnest embarrassments were smoking cigarettes in the ground-floor meeting room, the lights already on. On the train he took a window seat and pulled the hood of his rain parka over his face, pretending to sleep. When he got out at Rahnsdorf, he kept his eyes on the ground and moved more slowly than the early commuters, letting them disperse. The sky was nearly dark. As soon as he was alone he walked more briskly, as if he were out for exercise. Two cars, not police, hissed past him. In the drizzle he looked like nobody. When he rounded the last bend before the house and didn’t see anyone on the street, he broke into a lope. The soil here was sandy and drained well. At least on the gravel of the driveway, he wasn’t leaving footprints. No matter how many times he’d gone over the logistics in his head, he couldn’t quite see how it would work: how he could conceal himself completely and still be within striking distance. He was desperate to keep Annagret out of it, to keep her safe in her essential goodness, but he was afraid that he wouldn’t be able to. His anxiety the previous night had swirled around the image of some awful three-person scrum that would leave her trust in him shattered. He strung the piano wire between two railing posts, across the second of the wooden steps to the back porch. Tightening it at a level low enough that she could not too obviously step over it, he dug the wire into the wood of the posts and flaked some paint off them, but there was nothing to be done about that. In the middle of his first night of anxiety, he’d got out of bed and gone to the rectory’s basement staircase to conduct a test of tripping on the second step. He’d been surprised by how hard he pitched forward, in spite of knowing he was going to trip—he’d nearly sprained his wrist. But he wasn’t as athletic as the stepfather, he wasn’t a bodybuilder. . . . He went around to the front of the dacha and took off his boots. He wondered if the two VoPos he’d met the previous winter were patrolling again tonight. He remembered the senior one’s hope that they would meet again. “We’ll see,” he said aloud. Hearing himself, he noticed that his anxiety had abated. Much better to be doing than to be thinking about doing. He entered the house and took the key to the toolshed from the hook where it had hung since he was little. He went outside again and put on his boots and stepped carefully around the edge of the back yard, mindful of footprints. Once he was safely in the toolshed, which had no windows, he groped for a flashlight and found one on the usual shelf. In its light, he checked inventory. Wheelbarrow—yes. Shovel—yes. He was shocked to see, by his watch, that it was already nearly six o’clock. He turned off the flashlight and took it out into the drizzle with the shovel. The spot he had in mind was behind the shed, where his father piled yard waste. Beyond the pile, the pines were sparse, their fallen needles lying thick on soil furrowed by the frost heaves of winters past. The darkness was near-total here, the only light a few grayish panels between the surrounding trees, in the direction of the West’s greater brightness. His mind was now working so well that he thought to remove his watch and put it in his pocket, lest the shock of digging damage it. He turned on the flashlight and laid it on the ground while he cleared needles, setting aside the most freshly fallen in a separate pile. Then he turned out the light and dug. “If you are amenable to that offer, I am prepared to respond with this facial expression.”Buy the print » Chopping through roots was the worst—hard work and loud work. But the neighboring houses were dark, and he stopped every few minutes to listen. All he heard was the rustle of rain and the faint generic sounds of civilization that collected in the basin of the lake. Again he was glad of the soil’s sandiness. He was soon into gravel, noisier to dig through but harder to slip on. He worked implacably, chopping roots, levering out larger stones, until he recalled, with some panic, that his sense of time was messed up. He scrambled out of the hole for the flashlight. Eight-forty-five. The hole was more than a half-metre deep. Not deep enough, but a good start. He made himself keep digging, but now his anxiety was back, prompting him to wonder what time it was, what time. He knew he had to hold out and keep doing, not thinking, for as long as he could, but he soon became too anxious to wield the shovel with any force. It wasn’t even nine-thirty, Annagret hadn’t even met her stepfather in the city yet, but he climbed out of the hole and forced himself to eat some bread. Bite, chew, swallow, bite, chew, swallow. The problem was that he was parched and hadn’t brought water. Fully out of his head, he dropped the bread on the ground and wandered back to the shed with the shovel. He could almost not remember where he was. He started to clean his gloved hands on the wet grass but was too out of his head to finish the job. He wandered around the edge of the yard, stepped wrong and left a deep footprint in a flower bed, dropped to his knees and madly filled it, and managed to leave an even deeper footprint. By now he was convinced that minutes were passing like seconds without his knowing it. From a great distance he could discern his ridiculousness. He could picture himself spending the rest of the night leaving footprints while cleaning his hands after filling footprints he’d left while cleaning his hands, but he also sensed the danger of picturing this. If he let his resolution be taken over by silliness, he was liable to put down the shovel and go back to the city and laugh at the idea of himself as a killer. Be the former Andreas, not the man he wanted to be now. He saw it clearly in those terms. He had to kill the man he’d always been, by killing someone else. “Fuck it,” he said, deciding to leave the deep footprint unfilled. He didn’t know how long he’d knelt on the grass having extraneous and postponable thoughts, but he feared that it was a lot more time than it had felt like. Again from a great distance, he observed that he was thinking crazily. And maybe this was what craziness was: an emergency valve to relieve the pressure of unbearable anxiety. Interesting thought, bad time to be having it. There were a lot of small things he should have been remembering to do now, in the proper sequence, and wasn’t. He found himself on the front porch again without knowing how he’d got there. This couldn’t be a good sign. He took off his muddy boots and his slippery socks and went inside. What else, what else, what else? He’d left his gloves and the shovel on the front porch. He went back out for them and came inside again. What else? Shut the door and lock it. Unlock the back door. Practice opening it. Extraneous bad thought: were the whorls of toe prints unique, like those of fingerprints? Was he leaving traceable toe prints? Worse thought: what if the fucker thought to bring a flashlight or routinely carried one on his bike? Even worse thought: the fucker probably did routinely carry a flashlight on his bike, in case of a nighttime breakdown. A still worse thought was available to Andreas—namely, that Annagret would use her body, would feign uncontrollable lust, to forestall any business with a flashlight—but he was determined not to entertain it, not even for the relief from his terrible new anxiety, because it would entail being conscious of an obvious fact, which was that she must already have used her body and feigned lust to get the fucker out here. The only way Andreas could stand to picture the killing was to leave her entirely out of it. If he let her into it—allowed himself to acknowledge that she was using her body to make it happen—the person he wanted to kill was no longer her stepfather but himself. For putting her through a thing like that, for dirtying her in the service of his plan. If he was willing to kill the stepfather for dirtying her, it logically followed that he should kill himself for it. And so, instead, he entertained the thought that, even with a flashlight, the stepfather might not see the trip wire. He’d heard it said that every suicide was a proxy for a murder that the perpetrator could only symbolically commit; every suicide a murder gone awry. He was prepared to feel universally grateful to Annagret, but right now he was more narrowly grateful that she was bringing him a person worth killing. He imagined himself purified and humbled afterward, freed finally of his sordid history. Even if he ended up in prison, she would literally have saved his life. But where was his own flashlight? It wasn’t in one of his pockets. It could be anywhere, although he surely hadn’t dropped it randomly in the driveway. Without it, he couldn’t see his watch, and without seeing his watch he couldn’t ascertain whether he had time to put his boots on and return to the back yard and find the flashlight and ascertain whether he did, in fact, have time to be looking for it. The universe, its logic, suddenly felt crushing to him. There was, however, a small light above the kitchen stove. Turn it on for one second and check his watch? He had too complicated a mind to be a killer, too much imagination for it. He could see no rational risk in turning on the stove light, but part of having a complicated mind was understanding its limits, understanding that it couldn’t think of everything. Stupidity mistook itself for intelligence, whereas intelligence knew its own stupidity. An interesting paradox. But it didn’t answer the question of whether he should turn the light on. And why was it so important to look at his watch? He couldn’t actually think of why. This went to his point about intelligence and its limits. He leaned the shovel against the back door and sat down cross-legged on the mud rug. Then he worried that the shovel was going to fall over. He reached to steady it with such an unsteady hand that he knocked it over. The noise was catastrophic. He jumped to his feet and turned on the stove light long enough to check his watch. He still had at least thirty minutes, probably more like forty-five. “I can never tell if I’m hungry or just bored.”Buy the print » He sat down on the rug again and fell into a state that was like a fever dream in every respect except that he was fully aware of being asleep. It was like being dead without the relief from torment. And maybe the adage had it backward, maybe every murder was a suicide gone awry, because what he was feeling, besides an all-permeating compassion for his tormented self, was that he had to follow through with the killing to put himself out of his misery. He wouldn’t be the one dying, but he might as well have been, because the relief that would follow the killing had a deathlike depth and finality in prospect. For no apparent reason, he snapped out of his dream and into a state of chill clarity. Had he heard something? There was nothing but the trickle and patter of light rain. It seemed to him that a lot of time had passed. He stood up and grasped the handle of the shovel. He was having a new bad thought—that, for all his care in planning, he’d somehow neglected to consider what he would do if Annagret and her stepfather simply didn’t show up; he’d been so obsessed with logistics that he hadn’t noticed this enormous blind spot, and now, because the weekend was coming and his parents might be out here, he was facing the task of refilling the hole that he’d dug for nothing—when he heard a low voice outside the kitchen window. A girl’s voice. Annagret. Where was the bike? How could he not have heard the bike? Had they walked it down the driveway? The bike was essential. He heard a male voice, somewhat louder. They were going around behind the house. It was all happening so quickly. He was shaking so much that he could hardly stand. He didn’t dare touch the doorknob for fear of making a sound. “The key’s on a hook,” he heard Annagret say. He heard her feet on the steps. And then: a floor-shaking thud, a loud grunt. He grabbed the doorknob and turned it the wrong way and then the right way. As he ran out, he thought he didn’t have the shovel, but he did. It was in his hands, and he brought the convex side of its blade down hard on the dark shape looming up in front of him. The body collapsed on the steps. He was a murderer now. Pausing to make sure of where the body’s head was, he raised the shovel over his shoulder and hit the head so hard he heard the skull crack. Everything so far fully within the bounds of planned logistics. Annagret was somewhere to his left, making the worst sound he’d ever heard, a moan-keen-retch-strangulation sound. Without looking in her direction, he scrambled down past the body, dropped the shovel, and pulled the body off the steps by its feet. Its head was on its side now. He picked up the shovel and hit the head on the temple as hard as he could, to make sure. At the second crack of skull, Annagret gave a terrible cry. “It’s over,” he said, breathing hard. “There won’t be any more of it.” He dimly saw her moving on the porch, coming to the railing. Then he heard the strangely childish and almost dear sounds of her throwing up. He didn’t feel sick himself. More like post-orgasmic, immensely weary and even more immensely sad. He wasn’t going to throw up, but he began to cry, making his own childish sounds. He dropped the shovel, sank to his knees, and sobbed. His mind was empty, but not of sadness. The drizzle was so fine it was almost a mist. When he’d cried himself dry, he felt so tired that his first thought was that he and Annagret should go to the police and turn themselves in. He didn’t see how he could do what still had to be done. Killing had brought no relief at all—what had he been thinking? The relief would be to turn himself in at the police station. Annagret had been still while he cried, but now she came down from the porch and crouched by him. At the touch of her hand on his shoulder, he sobbed again. “Sh-h, sh-h,” she said. She put her face to his wet cheek. The feel of her skin, the mercy of her warm proximity: his weariness evaporated. “I must smell like vomit,” she said. “No.” “Is he dead?” “He must be.” “This is the real bad dream. Right now. Before wasn’t so bad. This is the real bad.” “I know.” She began to cry voicelessly, huffingly, and he took her in his arms. He could feel her tension escaping in the form of whole-body tremors, and there was nothing he could do with his compassion except hold her until the tremors subsided. When they finally did, she wiped her nose on her sleeve and pressed her face to his. She opened her mouth against his cheek, a kind of kiss. They were partners, and it would have been natural to go inside the house and seal their partnership, and this was how he knew for certain that his love for her was pure: he pulled away and stood up. “Don’t you like me?” she whispered. “Actually, I love you.” “I want to come and see you. I don’t care if they catch us.” “I want to see you, too. But it’s not right. Not safe. Not for a long time.” In the darkness, at his feet, she seemed to slump. “Then I’m completely alone.” “You can think of me thinking of you, because that’s what I’ll be doing whenever you think of me.” She made a little snorting sound, possibly mirthful. “I barely even know you.” “Safe to say I don’t make a habit of killing people.” “It’s a terrible thing,” she said, “but I guess I should thank you. Thank you for killing him.” She made another possibly mirthful sound. “Just hearing myself say that makes me all the more sure that I’m the bad one. I made him want me, and then I made you do this.” Andreas was aware that time was passing. “What happened with the motorcycle?” She didn’t answer. “Is the motorcycle here?” “No.” She took a deep breath. “He was doing maintenance after dinner. He didn’t have it put back together when I went to meet him—he needed some new part. He said we should go out some other night.” Not very ardent of him, Andreas thought. “I thought maybe he’d gotten suspicious,” she said. “I didn’t know what to do, but I said I really wanted it to be tonight.” Again, Andreas suppressed the thought of how she’d persuaded the stepfather. “So we took the train,” she said. “Not good.” “I’m sorry!” “No, it was the right thing to do, but it makes things harder for us.” “We didn’t sit together. I said it was safer not to.” Soon other riders on the train would be seeing the missing man’s picture in the newspaper, maybe even on television. The entire plan had hinged on the motorcycle. But Andreas needed to keep her morale up. “You’re very smart,” he said. “You did the right thing. I’m just worried that even the earliest train won’t get you home in time.” “My mother goes straight to bed when she comes home. I left my bedroom door closed.” “You thought of that.” “Just to be safe.” “You’re very, very smart.” “Do you need prescription eye holes? Or just eye holes?”Buy the print » “Not smart enough. They’re going to catch us. I’m sure of it. We shouldn’t have taken the train, I hate trains, people stare at me, they’ll remember me. But I didn’t know what else to do.” “Just keep being smart. The hardest part is behind you.” She clutched his arms and pulled herself to her feet. “Please kiss me,” she said. “Just once, so I can remember it.” He kissed her forehead. “No, on the mouth,” she said. “We’re going to be in jail forever. I want to have kissed you. It’s all I’ve been thinking about. It’s the only way I got through the week.” He was afraid of where a kiss might lead—time was continuing to pass—but he needn’t have been. Annagret kept her lips solemnly closed. She must have been seeking the same thing he was. A cleaner way, an escape from the filth. For his part, the darkness of the night was a blessing: if he could have seen the look in her eyes, he might not have been able to let go of her. While she waited in the driveway, away from the body, he went inside the house. The kitchen felt steeped in the evil of his lying in ambush there, the evil contrast between a world in which Horst had been alive and the world where he was dead, but he forced himself to put his head under the faucet and gulp down water. Then he went to the front porch and put his socks and boots back on. He found the flashlight in one of the boots. When he came around the side of the house, Annagret ran to him and kissed him heedlessly, with open mouth, her hands in his hair. She was heartbreakingly teen-aged, and he didn’t know what to do. He wanted to give her what she wanted—he wanted it himself—but he was aware that what she ought to want, in the larger scheme, was not to get caught. He took her face in his gloved hands and said, “I love you, but we have to stop.” She shivered and burrowed into him. “Let’s have one night and then be caught. I’ve done all I can.” “Let’s not be caught and then have many nights.” “He wasn’t such a bad person, he just needed help.” “You need to help me for one minute. One minute and then you can lie down and sleep.” “It’s too awful.” “All you have to do is steady the wheelbarrow. You can keep your eyes shut. Can you do that for me?” In the darkness, he thought he could see her nod. He left her and picked his way back to the toolshed. It would be a lot easier to get the body into the wheelbarrow if she helped him lift it, but he found that he welcomed the prospect of wrangling the body by himself. He was protecting her from direct contact, keeping her as safe as he could, and he wanted her to know it. The body was in coveralls, work clothes from the power plant, suitable for motorcycle maintenance but not for a hot date in the country. It was hard to escape the conclusion that the fucker really hadn’t intended to come out here tonight, but Andreas did his best not to think about it. He rolled the body onto its back. It was heavy with gym-trained muscle. He found a wallet and zipped it into his own jacket, and then he tried to lift the body by its coveralls, but the fabric ripped. He was obliged to apply a bear hug to wrestle the head and torso onto the wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow tipped over sideways. Neither he nor Annagret said anything. They just tried again. There were further struggles behind the shed. She had to help him by pushing on the wheelbarrow’s handles while he pulled from the front. The footprint situation was undoubtedly appalling. When they were finally beside the grave, they stood and caught their breath. Water was softly dripping from pine needles, the scent of the needles mixing with the sharp and vaguely cocoa smell of fresh-turned earth. “That wasn’t so bad,” she said. “I’m sorry you had to help.” “It’s just . . . I don’t know.” “What is it?” “Are we sure there isn’t a God?” “It’s a pretty far-fetched idea, don’t you think?” “I have the strongest feeling that he’s still alive somewhere.” “Where, though? How could that be?” “It’s just a feeling I have.” “He used to be your friend. This is so much harder for you than for me.” “Do you think he was in pain? Was he frightened?” “Honestly, no. It happened very fast. And now that he’s dead he can’t remember pain. It’s as if he’d never existed.” He wanted her to believe this, but he wasn’t sure he believed it himself. If time was infinite, then three seconds and three years represented the same infinitely small fraction of it. And so, if inflicting three years of fear and suffering was wrong, as everyone would agree, then inflicting three seconds of it was no less wrong. He caught a fleeting glimpse of God in the math here, in the infinitesimal duration of a life. No death could be quick enough to excuse inflicting pain. If you were capable of doing the math, it meant that a morality was lurking in it. “Well,” Annagret said in a harder voice. “If there is a God, I guess my friend is on his way to Hell for raping me.” This was the first time she’d used the word “rape.” He loved that she wasn’t consistent; was possibly even somewhat dishonest. His wish to puzzle her out was as strong as his wish to lie down with her; the two desires almost amounted to the same thing. But time was passing. He jumped into the grave and set about deepening it. “I’m the one who should be doing that.” “Go in the shed and lie down. Try to sleep.” “I wish we knew each other better.” “Me, too. But you need to try to sleep.” She watched in silence for a long time, half an hour, while he dug. He had a confusing twinned sense of her closeness and complete otherness. Together, they’d killed a man, but she had her own thoughts, her own motives, so close to him and yet so separate. She’d seen immediately how important it was to be together—what a ceaseless torture it would be to remain apart, after what they’d done—while he was seeing it only now. She was just fifteen, but she was quick and he was slow. “This is the wine talking.”Buy the print » Only after she went to lie down did his mind shift back into logistics mode. He dug until three o’clock and then, without pausing, dragged and rolled the body into the hole and jumped down after it to wrestle it into a supine position. He didn’t want to have to remember the face, so he sprinkled some dirt over it. Then he turned on the flashlight and inspected the body for jewelry. There was a heavy watch, not inexpensive, and a sleazy gold neck chain. The watch came off easily, but to break the chain he had to plant a hand on the dirt-covered forehead and yank. Fortunately nothing was real, at least not for long. Infinitesimally soon, the eternity of his own death would commence and render all of this unreal. In two hours he had the hole refilled and was jumping on the dirt, compacting it. When he returned to the toolshed, the beam of the flashlight found Annagret huddled in a corner, shivering, her arms around her knees. He didn’t know which was more unbearable to see, her beauty or her suffering. He turned the light off. “Did you sleep?” “Yeah. I woke up freezing.” “I don’t suppose you noticed when the first train comes.” “Five-thirty-eight.” “You’re remarkable.” “He was the one who checked the time. It wasn’t me.” “Do you want to go over your story with me?” “No, I’ve been thinking about it. I know what to say.” The mood between the two of them felt cold and chalky now. For the first time, it occurred to Andreas that they might have no future together—that they’d done a terrible thing and would henceforth dislike each other for it. Love crushed by crime. Already it seemed like a very long time since she’d run to him and kissed him. Maybe she’d been right; maybe they should have spent one night together and then turned themselves in. “If nothing happens in a year,” he said, “and if you think you’re not being watched, it might be safe to see each other again.” “It might as well be a hundred years,” she said bitterly. “I’ll be thinking of you the whole time. Every day. Every hour.” He heard her standing up. “I’m going to the station now,” she said. “Wait twenty minutes. You don’t want to be seen standing around there.” “I have to warm up. I’ll run somewhere and then go to the station.” “I’m sorry about this.” “Not as sorry as I am.” “Are you angry at me? You can be. Whatever you need to be is fine with me.” “I’m just sick. I feel so sick. They’ll ask me one question, and everything will be obvious. I feel too sick to pretend.” “You came home at nine-thirty and he wasn’t there. You went to bed because you weren’t feeling well. . . .” “I already said we don’t have to go over it.” “I’m sorry.” She moved toward the door, bumped into him, and continued on outside. Somewhere in the darkness, she stopped. “So I guess I’ll see you in a hundred years.” “Annagret.” He could hear the earth sucking at her footsteps, see her dark form receding across the back yard. He’d never in his life felt more tired. But finishing his tasks was more bearable than thinking about her. Using the flashlight sparingly, he covered the grave with older and then fresher pine needles, did his best to kick away footprints and wheelbarrow ruts, and artfully strewed leaf litter and lawn waste. His boots and jacket sleeves were hopelessly muddy, but he was too spent to muster anxiety about it. At least he could change his pants. The mist had given way to a warmer fog that made the arrival of daylight curiously sudden. Fog was not a bad thing. He policed the back yard for footprints and wheelbarrow tracks. Only when the light was nearly full strength did he return to the back steps to remove the trip wire. There was more blood than he’d expected on the steps, less vomit than he’d feared on the bushes by the railing. He was seeing everything now as if through a long tube. He filled and refilled a watering can at the outside spigot, to wash away the blood. The last thing he did was to check the kitchen for signs of disturbance. All he found was wetness in the sink from the drink he’d taken. It would be dry by evening. He locked the front door behind him and set out walking toward Rahnsdorf. By eight-thirty he was back in the basement of the rectory. Peeling off his jacket, he realized that he still had the dead man’s wallet and jewelry, but he could sooner have flown to the moon than dispose of them now; he could barely untie his muddy boots. He lay down on his bed to wait for the police. They didn’t come. Not that day, that week, or that season—they never came at all. And why didn’t they? Among the least plausible of Andreas’s hypotheses was that he and Annagret had committed the perfect crime. Certainly it was possible that his parents hadn’t noticed what a wreck he’d made of the dacha’s back yard; the first heavy snow of the season had come the following week. But that nobody had noticed the unforgettably beautiful girl on either of her train trips? Nobody in her neighborhood had seen her and Horst walking to the station? Nobody had looked into where she’d been going in the weeks before Horst’s disappearance? Nobody had questioned her hard enough to break her? The last Andreas had seen of her, a feather would have broken her. Less implausible was that the Stasi had investigated the mother, and that her addiction and pilferage had come to light. The Stasi would naturally have interested itself in a missing informal collaborator. If the mother was in Stasi detention, the question wasn’t whether she’d confess to the murder (or, depending on how the Stasi chose to play it, to the crime of assisting Horst’s flight to the West). The only question was how much psychological torture she’d endure before she did. Or maybe the Stasi’s suspicions had centered on the stepdaughter in Leipzig. Or on Horst’s co-workers at the power plant, the ones he’d reported on. Maybe one of them was already in prison for the crime. For weeks after the killing, Andreas had looked at the newspapers every day. If the criminal police had been handling the case, they surely would have put a picture of the missing man in the papers. But no picture ever appeared. The only realistic explanation was that the Stasi was keeping the police out of it. Assuming he was right about this, he had one more hypothesis: the Stasi had easily broken Annagret, she’d led them to the dacha, and they’d discovered who owned it. To avoid public embarrassment of the Under-Secretary, they’d accepted Horst’s sexual predation as a mitigating circumstance and contented themselves with scaring the daylights out of Annagret. And to torture Andreas with uncertainty, to make his life a hell of anxiety and hypercaution, they’d left him alone. “It’s a new anti-depressant—instead of swallowing it, you throw it at anyone who appears to be having a good time.”July 2, 2001Buy the print » He hated this hypothesis, but unfortunately it made more sense than any of the others. He hated it because there was an easy way to test it: find Annagret and ask her. Already scarcely an hour of his waking days passed without his wanting to go to her, and yet, if he was wrong about his hypothesis, and if she was still under suspicion and still being closely watched, it would be disaster for them to meet. Only she could know when they were safe. He went back to counselling at-risk youths, but there was a new hollowness at his core that never left him. He no longer taught the kids levity. He was at risk himself now—at risk of weeping when he listened to their sad stories. It was as if sadness were a chemical element in everything he touched. His mourning was mostly for Annagret but also for his old lighthearted, libidinous self. He would have expected his primary feeling to be a feverish fear of discovery and arrest, but the Republic appeared to be intent on sparing him, for whatever sick reason, and he could no longer remember why he’d laughed at the country and its tastelessness. It now seemed to him more like a Republic of Infinite Sadness. Girls still came to his office door, interested in him, maybe even all the more fascinated by his air of sorrow, but instead of thinking about their pussies he thought about their young souls. Every one of them was an avatar of Annagret; her soul was in all of them. Meanwhile in Russia there was glasnost; there was Gorby. The true-believing little Republic, feeling betrayed by its Soviet father, cracked down harder on its own dissidents. The police had raided a sister church in Berlin, the Zion Church, and earnestness and self-importance levels were running high on Siegfeldstrasse. There was a wartime mood in the meeting rooms. Secluding himself, as always, in the basement, Andreas found that his sorrow hadn’t cured him of his megalomaniacal solipsism. If anything, it was all the stronger. He felt as if his misery had taken over the entire country. Late in the spring of 1989, his anxiety returned. At first he almost welcomed it, as if it were the companion of his AWOL libido, reawakened by warm nights and flowering trees. He found himself drawn to the television in the rectory’s common room to watch the evening news, unexpurgated, on ZDF. The embarrassments watching with him were jubilant, predicting regime collapse within twelve months, and it was precisely the prospect of regime collapse that made him anxious. Part of the anxiety was straightforward criminal worry: he suspected that only the Stasi was keeping the police at bay; that he was safe from prosecution only as long as the regime survived; that the Stasi was (irony of ironies) his only friend. But there was also a larger and more diffuse anxiety, a choking hydrochloric cloud. As Solidarity was legalized in Poland, as the Baltic states began to break away, as Gorbachev publicly washed his hands of his Eastern Bloc foster children, Andreas felt more and more as if his own death were imminent. Without the Republic to define him, he’d be nothing. His all-important parents would be nothing, be less than nothing, be dismal tainted holdovers from a discredited system, and the only world in which he mattered would come to an end. It got worse through the summer. He could no longer bear to watch the news, but even when he locked himself in his room he could hear people in the hallway yammering about the latest developments, the mass emigration through Hungary, the demonstrations in Leipzig, the rumors of a coming coup. On a Tuesday morning in October, after the largest demonstration in Leipzig yet, the young vicar came tapping on his door. The guy ought to have been in giddy spirits, but something was troubling him. Instead of sitting down cross-legged, he paced the room. “I’m sure you heard the news,” he said. “A hundred thousand people in the street and no violence.” “Hooray?” Andreas said. The vicar hesitated. “I need to come clean with you about something,” he said. “I should have told you a long time ago—I guess I was a coward. I hope you can forgive me.” Andreas wouldn’t have figured the guy for an informant, but his preamble had that flavor. “It’s not that,” the vicar said, reading his thought. “But I did have a visit from the Stasi, about two years ago. Two guys who looked the part. They had some questions about you, and I answered them. They implied that I’d be arrested if you found out they’d been here.” “But now it turns out that their guns are loaded with daisy seeds.” “They said it was a criminal matter, but they didn’t say what kind. They showed me a picture of that girl who came here. They wanted to know if you’d spoken to her. I said you might have, because you’re the youth counsellor. I didn’t say anything definite. But they also wanted to know if I’d seen you on some particular night. I said I wasn’t sure—you spend so much time alone in your room. The whole time we were having this conversation, I’m pretty sure you were down here, but they didn’t want to see you. And they never came back.” “That’s all?” “Nothing happened to you, nothing happened to any of us, and so I assumed that everything was O.K. But I felt bad about talking to them and not telling you. I wanted you to know.” “Now that the ice is melting, the bodies are coming to the surface.” The vicar bristled. “I think we’ve been good to you. It’s been a good arrangement. I know I probably should have said something earlier. But the fact is we’ve always been a little afraid of you.” “I’m grateful. Grateful and sorry for any trouble.” “Is there anything you want to tell me?” Andreas shook his head, and the vicar left him alone with his anxiety. If the Stasi had come to the church, it meant that Annagret had been questioned, and had talked. This meant that the Stasi had at least some of the facts, maybe all of them. But, with a hundred thousand people assembling unhindered on the streets of Leipzig, the Stasi’s days were obviously numbered. Before long, the VoPos would take over, the real police would do policework. . . . He jumped up from his bed and put on a coat. If nothing else, he now knew that he had little to lose by seeing Annagret. Unfortunately, the only place he could think of to look for her was at the Erweiterte Oberschule nearest to her old neighborhood, in Friedrichshain. It seemed inconceivable that she’d proceeded to an EOS, and yet what else would she be doing? He left the church and hurried through the streets, taking some comfort in their enduring drabness, and stationed himself by the school’s main entrance. Through the high windows he could see students continuing to receive instruction in Marxist biology and Marxist math. When the last hour ended, he scanned the faces of the students streaming out the doors. He scanned until the stream had dwindled to a trickle. He was disappointed but not really surprised. “Well, that was a birthday party the kids won’t soon forget.”February 23, 2009Buy the print » For the next week, every afternoon and evening, he loitered outside judo clubs, at sports centers, at bus stops in Annagret’s old neighborhood. By the end of October, he’d given up hope of finding her, but he continued to wander the streets. He trawled the margins of protests, both planned and spontaneous, and listened to ordinary citizens risking imprisonment by demanding fair elections, free travel, the neutering of the Stasi. Honecker was gone, the new government was in crisis, and every day that passed without violence made a Tiananmen-style crackdown seem less likely. Change was coming, and there was nothing he could do but wait to be engulfed by it. And then, on November 4th, a miracle. Half the city had bravely taken to the streets. He was moving through crowds methodically, scanning faces, smiling at the loudspeakered voice of reason rejecting reunification and calling for reform instead. On Alexanderplatz, toward the ragged rear of the crowd, among the claustrophobes and undecideds, his heart gave a lurch before his brain knew why. There was a girl. A girl with spikily chopped hair and a safety-pin earring, a girl who was nonetheless Annagret. Her arm was linked with the arm of a similarly coiffed girl. Both of them blank-faced, aggressively bored. She’d ceased to be the good girl. “WE MUST FIND OUR OWN WAY. WE MUST LEARN TO TAKE THE BEST FROM OUR IMPERFECT SYSTEM AND THE BEST FROM THE SYSTEM WE OPPOSED.” As if seeking relief from the boringness of the amplified voice, Annagret looked around the crowd and saw Andreas. Her eyes widened. He was smiling uncontrollably. She didn’t smile back, but she did put her mouth to the ear of the other girl and break away from her. As she approached him, he could see more clearly how changed her demeanor was, how unlikely it was that she might still love him. She stopped short of embrace range. “I can only talk for a minute,” she said. “We don’t have to talk. Just tell me where I can find you.” She shook her head. Her radical haircut and the safety pin in her ear were helpless against her beauty, but her unhappiness wasn’t. Her features were the same as two years ago, but the light in her eyes had gone out. “Trust me,” he said. “There’s no danger.” “I’m in Leipzig now. We’re only up for the day.” “Is that your sister?” “No, a friend. She wanted to be here.” “I’ll come and see you in Leipzig. We can talk.” She shook her head. “You don’t want to see me again,” he said. She looked carefully over one shoulder and then over the other. “I don’t even know. I’m not thinking about that. All I know is we’re not safe. That’s all I can think about.” “Annagret. I know you talked to the Stasi. They came to the church and asked about me. But nothing happened, they didn’t question me. We’re safe. You did the right thing.” He moved closer. She flinched and edged away from him. “We’re not safe,” she said. “They know a lot. They’re just waiting.” “If they know so much anyway, it doesn’t matter if we’re seen together. They’ve already waited two years. They’re not going to do anything to us now.” She looked over her shoulder again. “I should go back.” “I have to see you,” he said, for no reason except honesty. “It’s killing me not to see you.” She hardly seemed to be listening; was lost in her unhappiness. “They took my mother away,” she said. “I had to tell them some kind of story. They put her in a psychiatric hospital for addiction, and then she went to prison.” “I’m sorry.” “But she’s been writing letters to the police. She wants to know why they didn’t investigate the disappearance. She gets released in February.” “Did you talk to the police yourself?” “I can’t see you,” she said, her eyes on the ground. “You did a big thing for me, but I don’t think I can ever see you again. I had the most horrible feeling when I saw you. Desire and death and that thing. It’s all mixed up and horrible. I don’t want to want things like that anymore.” “Let me make it go away.” “It will never go away.” “Let me try.” She murmured something he couldn’t hear above the noise. Possibly I don’t want to want it. Then she ran to her friend, and the two of them walked away briskly, without looking back.

In the year 1195, the great philosopher Ibn Rushd, once the qadi, or judge, of Seville and most recently the personal physician to the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub in his home town of Córdoba, was formally discredited and disgraced on account of his liberal ideas, which were unacceptable to the increasingly powerful Berber fanatics who were spreading like a pestilence across Arab Spain, and was sent to live in internal exile in the small village of Lucena, a village full of Jews who could no longer say they were Jews because they had been forced to convert to Islam. Ibn Rushd, a philosopher who was no longer permitted to expound his philosophy, all of whose writing had been banned and burned, felt instantly at home among the Jews who could not say they were Jews. He had been a favorite of the Caliph of the present ruling dynasty, the Almohads, but favorites go out of fashion, and Abu Yusuf Yaqub had allowed the fanatics to push the great commentator on Aristotle out of town. The philosopher who could not speak his philosophy lived on a narrow unpaved street in a humble house with small windows and was terribly oppressed by the absence of light. He set up a medical practice in Lucena, and his status as the ex-physician of the Caliph himself brought him patients; in addition, he used what assets he had to enter modestly into the horse trade, and also financed the making of tinajas, the large earthenware vessels, in which the Jews who were no longer Jews stored and sold olive oil and wine. One day soon after the beginning of his exile, a girl of perhaps sixteen summers appeared outside his door, smiling gently, not knocking or intruding on his thoughts in any way, and simply stood there waiting patiently until he became aware of her presence and invited her in. She told him that she was newly orphaned, that she had no source of income, but preferred not to work in the whorehouse, and that her name was Dunia, which did not sound like a Jewish name because she was not allowed to speak her Jewish name, and, because she was illiterate, she could not write it down. She told him that a traveller had suggested the name and said it was Greek and meant “the world,” and she had liked that idea. Ibn Rushd, the translator of Aristotle, did not quibble with her, knowing that it meant “the world” in enough tongues to make pedantry unnecessary. “Why have you named yourself after the world?” he asked her, and she replied, looking him in the eye as she spoke, “Because a world will flow from me and those who flow from me will spread across the world.” Being a man of reason, Ibn Rushd did not guess that the girl was a supernatural creature, a jinnia, of the tribe of female jinn: a grand princess of that tribe, on an earthly adventure, pursuing her fascination with human men in general and brilliant ones in particular. He took her into his cottage as his housekeeper and lover, and in the muffled night she whispered her “true”—that is to say, false—Jewish name into his ear, and that was their secret. Dunia the jinnia was as spectacularly fertile as her prophecy had implied. In the two years, eight months, and twenty-eight days and nights that followed, she was pregnant three times and brought forth a multiplicity of children, at least seven on each occasion, it would appear, and on one occasion eleven, or possibly nineteen; the records are vague. All the children inherited her most distinctive feature: they had no earlobes. If Ibn Rushd had been a scholar of the occult arcana, he would have realized then that his children were the offspring of a non-human mother, but he was too wrapped up in himself to work it out. The philosopher who could not philosophize feared that his children would inherit from him the sad gifts that were his treasure and his curse. “To be thin-skinned, farsighted, and loose-tongued,” he said, “is to feel too sharply, see too clearly, speak too freely. It is to be vulnerable to the world when the world believes itself invulnerable, to understand its mutability when it thinks itself immutable, to sense what’s coming before others sense it, to know that the barbarian future is tearing down the gates of the present while others cling to the decadent, hollow past. If our children are fortunate, they will inherit only your ears, but, regrettably, as they are undeniably mine, they will probably think too much too soon and hear too much too early, including things that are not permitted to be thought or heard.” “Tell me a story,” Dunia often demanded in bed in the early days of their cohabitation. Ibn Rushd quickly discovered that in spite of her seeming youth she could be a demanding and opinionated individual, in bed and out of it. He was a big man, and she was like a little bird or a stick insect, but he often felt that she was the stronger of the two. She was the joy of his old age, but she demanded from him a level of energy that was hard to maintain. Sometimes all he wanted to do in bed was sleep, but Dunia saw his attempts to nod off as hostile acts. “If you stay up all night making love,” she said, “you actually feel better rested than if you snore for hours like an ox. This is well known.” At his age, it wasn’t always easy to enter into the required condition for the sexual act, especially on consecutive nights, but she saw his elderly difficulty with arousal as proof of his unloving nature. “If you find a woman attractive, there is never a problem,” she told him. “Doesn’t matter how many nights in a row. Me, I’m always horny. I can go on forever—I have no stopping point.” His discovery that her physical ardor could be quelled by narrative had provided some relief. “Tell me a story,” she said, curling up under his arm so that his hand rested on her head, and he thought, Good, I’m off the hook tonight, and gave her, little by little, the story of his mind. He used words that many of his contemporaries found shocking, including “reason,” “logic,” and “science,” which were the three pillars of his thought, the ideas that had led to his books’ being burned. Dunia was afraid of these words, but her fear excited her and she snuggled in closer and said, “Hold my head while you’re filling it with your lies.” There was a deep, sad wound in him, because he was a defeated man, had lost the great battle of his life to a dead Persian, Ghazali of Tus, an adversary who had been dead for eighty-five years. A hundred years earlier, Ghazali had written a book called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers,” in which he attacked Greeks like Aristotle, the Neoplatonists, and their allies, Ibn Rushd’s great precursors Ibn Sina and al-Farabi. Ghazali had suffered a crisis of belief at one point, but had recovered with such conviction that he became the greatest scourge of philosophy in the history of the world. Philosophy, he jeered, was incapable of proving the existence of God, or even of proving the impossibility of there being two gods. Philosophy believed in the inevitability of causes and effects, which was an insult to the power of God, who could easily intervene to make causes ineffectual and alter effects if He so chose. “What happens,” Ibn Rushd asked Dunia when the night wrapped them in silence and they could speak of forbidden things, “if a lighted stick is brought into contact with a ball of cotton?” “The cotton catches fire, of course,” she answered. “And why does it catch fire?” “Because that is the way of it,” she said. “The fire licks the cotton and the cotton becomes part of the fire. It’s how things are.” “They’re powered by Internet outrage.”Buy the print » “The law of nature,” he said. “Causes have their effects.” And her head nodded beneath his caressing hand. “He disagreed,” Ibn Rushd said, and she knew that he meant the enemy, Ghazali. “He said that the cotton caught fire because God made it do so, because in God’s universe the only law is what God wills.” “So if God had wanted the cotton to put out the fire, if He had wanted the fire to become part of the cotton, He could have done that?” “Yes,” Ibn Rushd said. “According to Ghazali’s book, God could do that.” She thought for a moment. “That’s stupid,” she said, finally. Even in the dark she could sense the resigned smile, the smile with cynicism in it as well as pain, spreading crookedly across his bearded face. “He would say that this was the true faith,” he answered her, “and that to disagree with it would be . . . incoherent.” “So anything can happen if God decides it’s O.K.,” she said. “A man’s feet might no longer touch the ground, for example. He could start walking on air.” “A miracle,” Ibn Rushd said, “is just God changing the rules by which He chooses to play, and if we don’t comprehend it, it is because God is ultimately ineffable, which is to say, beyond our comprehension.” She was silent again. “Suppose I suppose,” she said, at length, “that God does not exist. Suppose you make me suppose that ‘reason,’ ‘logic,’ and ‘science’ possess a magic that makes God unnecessary. Can one even suppose that it would be possible to suppose such a thing?” She felt his body stiffen. Now he was afraid of her words, she thought, and it pleased her in an odd way. “No,” he said, too harshly. “That really would be a stupid supposition.” He had written his own book, “The Incoherence of the Incoherence,” replying to Ghazali across a hundred years and thousands of miles, but in spite of its snappy title it had not diminished the dead Persian’s influence, and finally it was Ibn Rushd who had been disgraced, whose books had been cast into the fire, which had consumed the pages because that was what God had decided at that moment that the fire should be permitted to do. In all his writing, Ibn Rushd had tried to reconcile the words “reason,” “logic,” and “science” with the words “God,” “faith,” and “Qur’an,” but he had not succeeded, even though he had used with great subtlety the argument from kindness, demonstrating by Qur’anic quotation that God must exist because of the garden of earthly delights he had provided for mankind: and do we not send down from the clouds pressing forth rain, water pouring down in abundance, that you may thereby produce corn and herbs and gardens planted thick with trees? He was a keen amateur gardener, and the argument from kindness seemed to him to prove both God’s existence and his essentially kindly, liberal nature, but the proponents of a harsher God had beaten him. Now he lay, or so he believed, with a converted Jew whom he had saved from the whorehouse and who seemed capable of seeing into his dreams, where he argued with Ghazali in the language of irreconcilables, the language of wholeheartedness, of going all the way, which would have doomed him to the executioner if he had used it in waking life. As Dunia filled up with children and then emptied them into the small house, there was less room for Ibn Rushd’s excommunicated “lies.” The couple’s moments of intimacy became less frequent, and money was a problem. “A true man faces the consequences of his actions,” she told him, “especially a man who believes in causes and effects.” But making money had never been his forte. The horse-trading business was treacherous and full of cutthroats, and his profits were small. He had many competitors in the tinaja market, so prices were low. “Charge your patients more,” Dunia advised him with some irritation. “You should cash in on your former prestige, tarnished as it is. What else have you got? It’s not enough to be a baby-making monster. You make babies, the babies come, the babies must be fed. That is ‘logic.’ That is ‘rational.’ ” She knew which words she could turn against him. “Not to do this,” she cried triumphantly, “is ‘incoherence.’ ” The jinn are fond of glittering things, gold and jewels and so on, and often they conceal their hoards in subterranean caves. Why did the jinnia princess not cry “Open!” at the door of a treasure cave and solve their financial problems at a stroke? Because she had chosen a human life, as the “human” wife of a human being, and she was bound by her choice. To reveal her true nature to her lover at this late stage would have been to reveal a kind of betrayal, a lie, at the heart of their relationship. So she remained silent, fearing he might abandon her. There was a Persian book called “Hazar Afsaneh,” or “One Thousand Stories,” which had been translated into Arabic. In the Arabic version, there were fewer than a thousand stories but the action was spread over a thousand nights, or, because round numbers were considered ugly, a thousand nights and one night more. Ibn Rushd had not seen the book, but several of its stories had been told to him at court. The story of the fisherman and the jinni appealed to him, not so much for its fantastic elements (the jinni from the lamp, the magic talking fishes, the bewitched prince who was half man and half marble) as for its technical beauty, the way its stories were folded within other stories and contained yet other stories, folded within themselves, so that the tale became a true mirror of life, Ibn Rushd thought, for in life all our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives, the histories of our families, or our homelands, or our beliefs. More beautiful even than the stories within stories was the story of the storyteller, a queen called Shahrazad or Scheherazade, who told her tales to a murderous husband to keep him from executing her. Stories told to defeat death, to civilize a barbarian. And at the foot of the marital bed sat Scheherazade’s sister, her perfect audience, asking for one more story, and then one more, and then yet another. From this sister, Ibn Rushd got the name he bestowed on the hordes of babies issuing from his lover Dunia’s loins, for the sister, as it happened, was called Dunyazad, “and what we have here filling up this dark house and forcing me to impose extortionate fees on my patients, the sick and infirm of Lucena, is the arrival of the Duniazát, that is, Dunia’s tribe, the race of Dunians, the Dunia people, which is to say the people of the world.” Dunia was deeply offended. “You mean,” she said, “that because we are not married our children cannot bear their father’s name.” He smiled his sad, crooked smile. “It is better that they be the Duniazát,” he said, “a name that contains the world and has not been judged by it. To call them the Rushdi would be to send them into history with a mark upon their brow.” “O.K., I’m ready—you can come in now.”Buy the print » Dunia began to speak of herself as Scheherazade’s sister, always asking for stories, only her Scheherazade was a man—her lover, not her brother—and some of his stories could get them both killed if the words were accidentally to escape from the darkness of their bedroom. So Ibn Rushd was a sort of anti-Scheherazade, Dunia told him, the exact opposite of the storyteller of the “Thousand Nights and One Night”: her stories saved her life, while his put his life in danger. But then the Caliph Abu Yusuf Yaqub was triumphant in war, winning his greatest military victory, against the Christian King of Castile, Alfonso VIII, at Alarcos on the Guadiana River. After the Battle of Alarcos, in which the Caliph’s forces killed a hundred and fifty thousand Castilian soldiers, fully half the Christian army, Abu Yusuf Yaqub gave himself the name al-Mansur, the Victorious, and with the confidence of a conquering hero he brought the ascendancy of the fanatical Berbers to an end and summoned Ibn Rushd back to court. The mark of shame was wiped off the old philosopher’s brow, his exile ended. He was rehabilitated, undisgraced, and returned with honor to his old position of court physician, two years, eight months, and twenty-eight days and nights after his exile began, which was to say, one thousand days and nights and one more day and night; and Dunia was pregnant again, of course, and he did not marry her, of course, he never gave her children his name, of course, and he did not bring her with him to the Almohad court, of course, so she slipped out of history—he took it with him when he left, along with his robes, his bubbling retorts, and his manuscripts, some bound, others in scrolls, manuscripts of other men’s books, for his own had been burned, though many copies survived, he’d told her, in other cities, in the libraries of friends, and in places where he had concealed them against the day of his disfavor, for a wise man always prepares for adversity, but, if he is properly modest, lets good fortune take him by surprise. He left without finishing his breakfast or saying goodbye, and she did not threaten him, did not reveal her true nature or the power that lay hidden within her, did not say, I know what you say aloud in your dreams, when you suppose the thing that would be stupid to suppose, when you stop trying to reconcile the irreconcilable and speak the terrible, fatal truth. She allowed history to leave her without trying to hold it back, the way children allow a grand parade to pass, holding it in their memory, making it their own; and she went on loving him, even though he had so casually abandoned her. You were my everything, she wanted to say to him. You were my sun and moon, and who will hold my head now, who will kiss my lips, who will be a father to our children? But he was a great man destined for the halls of the immortals, and these squalling brats were no more than the jetsam he left in his wake. It is believed that Dunia remained among human beings for a while, perhaps hoping against hope for Ibn Rushd’s return, and that he continued to send her money, that maybe he visited her from time to time, and that she gave up on the horse business but went on with the tinajas. But now that the sun and moon of history had set forever on her house her story became a thing of shadows and mysteries, so maybe it’s true, as people said, that after Ibn Rushd died his spirit returned to her and fathered even more children. People also said that Ibn Rushd brought her a lamp with a jinni in it, and the jinni was the father of the children born after he left her—so we see how easily rumor turns things upside down! They also said, less kindly, that the abandoned woman took in any man who would pay her rent, and every man she took in left her with another brood, so that the Duniazát, the brood of Dunia, were no longer bastard Rushdis, or some of them were not, or many of them were not; for in most people’s eyes the story of her life had become a stuttering line, its letters dissolving into meaningless forms, incapable of revealing how long she lived, or how, or where, or with whom, or when and how—or if—she died. Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams whence the jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind. To the villagers of Lucena, she seemed to have dissolved, perhaps into fireless smoke. After Dunia left our world, the voyagers from the world of the jinn to ours became fewer in number, and then they stopped coming completely, and the slits in the world became overgrown with the unimaginative weeds of convention and the thornbushes of the dully material, until they finally closed up, and our ancestors were left to do the best they could without the benefits or curses of magic. But Dunia’s children thrived. That much can be said. And almost three hundred years later, when the Jews were expelled from Spain, even the Jews who could not say they were Jews, the great-grandchildren of Dunia’s great-grandchildren climbed onto ships in Cádiz and Palos de Moguer, or walked across the Pyrenees, or flew on magic carpets or in giant urns like the jinni kin they were. They traversed continents and sailed the seven seas and climbed high mountains and swam mighty rivers and slid into deep valleys and found shelter and safety wherever they could, and they forgot one another quickly, or remembered as long as they could and then forgot, or never forgot, becoming a family that was no longer exactly a family, a tribe that was no longer exactly a tribe, adopting every religion and no religion, all of them, after the centuries of conversion, ignorant of their supernatural origins and of the story of the forcible conversion of the Jews, some of them becoming manically devout while others were contemptuously disbelieving. They were a family without a place but with family in every place, a village without a location but winding in and out of every spot on the globe, like rootless plants, mosses or lichens or creeping orchids, who must lean upon others, being unable to stand alone. History is unkind to those it abandons and can be equally unkind to those who make it. Ibn Rushd died (of old age, or so we believe) while travelling in Marrakesh barely a year after his rehabilitation, and never saw his fame grow, never saw it spread beyond the borders of his own world and into the infidel world beyond, where his commentaries on Aristotle became the foundations of his mighty forebear’s popularity, the cornerstones of the infidels’ godless philosophy, saecularis, which meant the kind of idea that came only once in a saeculum, an age of the world, or maybe an idea for the ages, and which was the very image and echo of the ideas he had spoken only in dreams. Perhaps, as a godly man, Ibn Rushd would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need of belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders, because in the world he knew it was the children of his dead adversary, Ghazali, who multiplied and inherited the kingdom, while his own bastard brood spread out, leaving his forbidden name behind them, to populate the earth. A high proportion of the survivors ended up on the great North American continent, and many others on the great South Asian subcontinent, thanks to the phenomenon of “clumping,” which is part of the mysterious illogic of random distribution; and many of those afterward spread out west and south across the Americas, and north and west from that great diamond at the foot of Asia, into all the countries of the world, for of the Duniazát it can fairly be said that, in addition to peculiar ears, they all have itchy feet. Ibn Rushd was dead, but he and his adversary continued their dispute beyond the grave, for to the arguments of great thinkers there is no end, argument itself being a tool to improve the mind, the sharpest of all tools, born of the love of knowledge, which is to say, philosophy.

When I think about it, the freezer chest, it’s with a sensation of the ferry rocking and the North Sea beneath us, black because it was January, and then the artificial lighting of the lounge where they were sitting, Mark and the others—Starling, Henrietta, Poul, and Susanna—and where I was also sitting, with our English teacher, Bo, who found me interesting to talk to, because, as he said, “One would never know that you were so young.” But, in any case, they were sitting together over in a corner, and it was 1989, the d.j. had left, no one wanted to dance, it was late and a long way to Harwich, and then he went to bed anyway, the English teacher, and I was actually friends with Henrietta, so I wasn’t sure what to do. It was then that he called me over to the group, Mark did, and said that he wanted to tell me the story of the freezer chest. I should have seen it coming, of course, for he made no secret of not liking me. Once he’d said it in the middle of the cafeteria, and he’d said it straight out: “I don’t like you.” It had been a simple statement, and the place had grown quiet, even though Henrietta was there, too, and I thought she’d protest, since you couldn’t just say things like that; we weren’t twelve anymore. This was high school, after all. I was eighteen, most of us were, but there were a few older students who had dropped out to see the world, or to learn a trade, and had now taken up their schoolbooks again, and Mark was one of them; I think he was twenty-five. But Henrietta didn’t say a word, and so I said it myself, I said you couldn’t just sit there and say that sort of thing, but then Mark looked at me and said you certainly could, somebody ought to. He was sitting there with a classmate who was preparing for teachers college, while Henrietta ate her potato salad and got herself a Coke, and the would-be teacher never said boo. But then Mark decided to come along on the study trip to London, and I knew that it would prove difficult, for not only did Mark not like me but all the others liked him a lot, and even though I was friends with Henrietta I’d have to hang out with the English teacher, who claimed that he’d once flown with the Royal Canadian Air Force, and, as he was telling me how he’d ended up there and how his farsightedness had come between him and re-upping, I sat and looked over at the little group gathered around Mark. Henrietta was there, laughing every time he said something, but then, when the English teacher had gone to his bunk, he called me over, Mark did, and told me the story of the freezer chest. It began with him explaining how he’d once been a talented guitarist with a promising career that stretched out before him. He was in demand among solo performers, and the reason he was the oldest person in our school was that he’d had a life beforehand, on the road with his guitar. It had been an exciting but hard life, with all the late nights at small clubs, he said. Did I believe him? I shrugged my shoulders. He was difficult to fathom sometimes; you never knew what would come next with him. That much I had learned, because once Henrietta and I had gone to visit him at his flat. Henrietta had been wanting to visit Mark privately—she’d talked about it a lot, just as she talked a lot about incest, since it was around that time that it first became acceptable to talk about it, about the fact that it existed. Henrietta had seen something about it on TV, she said. She used the word “broken”—the broken child, she’d say, the child would never be normal, the child was broken—and I wanted to tell her that it wasn’t a nice thing to say about anyone, especially a kid, but on the other hand I really liked Henrietta’s manner when she said it. She became clearer, in a way, and I’d gone with her to Mark’s. He lived in a small one-bedroom flat on the edge of town, and he had a girlfriend whose name was Majken but whom everyone called the Switchman’s Shanty, because that’s what Mark called her. She was desperate like that, Henrietta said, riding the bus in from the country every day, but when we got there it was the would-be teacher who opened the door, and when Henrietta asked for Mark he said that Mark would be out in a little while, we could just have a seat, and so we did. I sat and wondered how long we’d be sitting there, and then Mark emerged from the bedroom. He came out and said that he’d just popped into the switchman’s shanty, “And now I’m all yours.” Then they laughed, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, and the Switchman’s Shanty also laughed when she appeared, a little while later. “Hey, this is a marathon, not a sprint.”Buy the print » I didn’t know if I should laugh, too, or how long we were supposed to remain seated, and, since this was after the business in the cafeteria, I really shouldn’t have been sitting there at all. But then we were drinking beer, and I could tell it would be only a matter of time before the wind shifted. And then here it came: “Mette,” I heard, as Mark went over to a wall where he’d hung up a bunch of curios from a trip to Morocco. “Mette,” he said, taking down an oblong object a good yard in length. It looked like beef jerky, and he threw it in my lap and asked if I knew what it was. “Yeah,” I said, “it’s a dried bull pizzle,” and Henrietta howled with laughter. The would-be teacher laughed, too, and the Switchman’s Shanty was apparently out in the kitchen, but Mark’s eyes grew still. Still, but not frozen. More like one of those places that leases farm machinery, after closing time—the plowshares, the leaking grease fittings. Then he said that he hadn’t reckoned I’d know. “Nice job,” he said, and hung the pizzle back up on the wall, while Henrietta laughed so hard that she almost couldn’t get it under control. I looked parched in my face, she said. “You look simply withered, Mette.” A little while later I wanted to go home, and then the Switchman’s Shanty wanted to go home, too. We walked to the station together, and I remember her telling me how funny Mark was when they were alone. He’s a real Teddy bear, she said, breaking twigs off the hedges we passed. I thought of Henrietta, her laughter; I thought of the would-be teacher, his unmoving features, and what sort of person brings a pizzle home from holiday. That isn’t normal, I thought, and then it was right after New Year’s and we were headed to England and Mark was telling me about the freezer chest. He told me that at one time he’d been a good guitarist. “Do you believe me?” he asked, and I could tell I was supposed to say yes. I didn’t actually care, but there was a mood around the table that expected me to say yes, and so I said yes. We would be in London for a week; I was already feeling homesick, and Henrietta was sitting next to me, so I said yes, I believed he’d been talented on the guitar. Mark smiled, and I smiled, and he smiled back at me, and I thought how much easier it was this way. For all I cared, he could have been a virtuoso. He could have been Eric Clapton. It didn’t matter. What mattered was the others. I had to allow him inside, even though one time, out in the hallway by our classroom, Mark had said, “Mette isn’t chubby, she’s fat,” so that everyone could hear. Henrietta had been there that day, too, Henrietta and the would-be teacher, but sometimes you have to eat shit, I thought, and I said, “Yes, I believe you when you say you were a talented guitarist.” I said it so that everyone could hear, and then he got to the freezer chest. He said that, unfortunately, he had been robbed of his great talent, because he’d been rummaging around one day in his grandmother’s freezer chest, whose hinge mechanism turned out to be broken, and, just as he was standing there about to grab some cinnamon kringles, the freezer lid had slammed down on his fingers. The freezer chest had crushed them. “See for yourself,” he said, waving his stumpy fingers in my face. “See, I’ll never barre a chord again.” There was a silence, Henrietta smiled, and I said, “That’s really a shame,” and he said, “You think so?” “Yes,” I said, “I do think so,” and then he paused deliberately, before saying, “But it’s all just bullshit, you little fool.” He said it easily, and then our corner dipped as the ferry to England hit a wave, and Henrietta, in particular, with her special insight into evil, could barely keep her seat. It was as if a heavy lid had slammed shut within me. That’s how I recall it, a great lid, and beneath it a frozen darkness that was all my own. While Mark held forth on my naïveté for the others, I fell back into the dark and thought of things that were impervious—cement floors, Plexiglas, ice packs—and that the safest way to avoid people like Mark was to seal yourself off, and then, when you were sealed off, it was about your face and getting it back in position, getting it to close over the darkness and everything you have stored inside. So, when he raised his beer with the others, I said that if he thought I was so dumb we could make a bet about who’d score highest on the graduating exams, and he said, “Sure, no problem,” and I said, “All right then, no problem,” and he laughed, saying, “Fuck yeah,” and I got to my feet, and he said we’d bet a pizza, and I said, “No problem.” He wanted to shake on it. I slapped my right hand against his chubby, outstretched fingers, and walked straight out onto the deck, and I’d like to think I stared out toward England. It was, in any case, ocean that I was staring across, and there isn’t much more to say about that week in London other than that I spent a week in London when I was eighteen. It wasn’t very hard to do better on the finals than Mark. I just got up every day and took care of my schoolwork and took care of myself. I also let Henrietta think what she wanted to whenever she said that if you compared the story about the freezer chest with something like incest I was being hypersensitive, and then she’d look self-important, while one month led to the next and in June we graduated. I got the second highest marks in the school. Mark did well enough that he was going to go to teachers college, Henrietta told me, as we rode around on the back of a decorated flatbed truck from one set of parents to the next, little Danish flags waving in the wind, most of us drunk from all the drinks they were serving, and it was at one of those receptions, when everyone had had enough and someone had finally turned down the stereo, that Mark came over to me. He tapped me on the shoulder and said that a man was a man, and that he was a twit. He wanted to admit that he’d lost our bet. I’d actually gone and done really well on the finals, he said. I didn’t say anything, but somebody clapped, and he said, “There was something about a pizza, wasn’t there?,” and I said, “No.” And he said, “Yes, there was,” that he wanted to spring for a pizza, and I said I didn’t want a pizza. “Yes, of course you do,” Henrietta said, but I didn’t want a pizza. “You can take your pizza and stick it up sideways,” I said, and I said it so everyone could hear, for at that point I’d already found the room in Copenhagen, university lay ahead and Jutland behind, so fuck what they thought. It got quiet. Mark said, Well, if that was the way I felt about it. “That’s the way I feel about it,” I said, and Henrietta said, “Now stop it, Mette, of course that’s not the way you feel,” and Mark said that I was obviously bearing a grudge, and Henrietta said that it was embarrassing, and Mark said something about small minds, and Poul said, Well, he’d be happy to eat a pizza, and Starling turned the stereo back up, while somewhere on the periphery our English teacher put his glasses on. I placed my hands on my knees and gazed at them—the nails on my fingers are glossy now, whereas then they were blue—and what I remember most after Mark left was Henrietta leaning over me. “Shame on you,” she said, and I’d like to know if she ever did anything about it, the incest.

It’s one of those airlines where you get your seat assignment at the gate, and they’re late to Logan and slow to get through security, so the lady at the counter can’t seat Charity and her mom together. Which means five-plus hours of freedom—hallelujah! Nonetheless, she pouts about having to sit with a total stranger, all because her mom was a spaz about the body scanner and they had to wait while a female agent was summoned to conduct a pat-down. Charity went through the scanner without protest, hands up like a criminal—it was kind of fun—standing in her sock feet in the chamber. She hustled out, in order to catch a glimpse of the agent’s screen, hoping to see her own skeleton, though she knew it wouldn’t be there. This wasn’t like X-rays at the doctor. What she saw was herself simplified to an outline: an empty female shape imposed over a green-gray field. “There’s more radiation in our phones, I bet,” Charity says, still not quite ready to let the issue drop. She doesn’t want to go to Seattle and visit Grams. Missing a week of school is cool, in theory, but her A.P. English teacher has assigned her a stupid compare-and-contrast about “A Tale of Two Cities,” to make up for the classes she’ll miss. Between that and a sheaf of Algebra 2 worksheets, she doesn’t see how she’s coming out ahead. She’s almost sixteen; why couldn’t she just have stayed home? Outside, men in orange vests and earmuffs and yellow knit gloves pull bags from the back of a flatbed trailer and chuck them into the guts of the plane. It’s drizzling, the dark tarmac streaky with reflections of pinkish guide lights. Six-thirty in the morning and they’ve been up since four. Charity’s seat turns out to be twenty rows in front of her mom’s: another miracle. “Try to get some sleep, Sweetie,” her mom says, working a piece of Nicorette free from its blister pack as she kisses her daughter’s cheek. “I’m gonna do whatever I’m gonna do,” she says. Case in point: she was up till almost one last night, Gchatting with her best friend, Lexie, and messing around on YouTube, trading links to cheesy nineties music videos and gross-out clips from medical reality shows. Charity is stuck in the middle seat. The window seat is occupied by a fat woman wearing a gray sweatshirt that says “Hawaii” in knobby grapefruit-colored letters, her fingernails painted to match, which Charity can see clearly, because the woman’s hands are pressed together in front of her. Head bowed and lips moving in silent prayer. Charity sits down in the empty aisle seat and begins her own prayer—that nobody will come, even though they keep announcing over the thing that the flight is full, no upgrades available, check rolling bags at the gate. When the guy appears, he’s older, way older—like thirty, maybe. He wears leather sandals and a powder-blue slim-cut dress shirt, untucked and with the sleeves rolled. When he lifts his black backpack up into the overhead compartment, Charity finds herself staring straight into his exposed navel, a bulging outie like a blind gold eye in his belly, which was waxed at some point and is now stubbled, like a face. The top of his boxers peeks up above the waist of what Charity just so happens to recognize as three-hundred-dollar True Religion jeans. “Keeping my seat warm for me?” he says. She mumbles a few words, any one of which might be “Sorry,” and heaves herself and her satchel-purse and her water bottle over to where she belongs, only to realize—idiot—that she’s left her shoes under the guy’s seat and has to ask him to move so she can get them. He gives her a tight obliging smile and half-shifts his legs, kind of miming the concept of “getting out of the way” while still being in it. She has to reach between his ankles to grab her All Stars, which he could’ve just handed to her, though in fairness to him if the situation were reversed she wouldn’t touch his shoes for anything. Those grody sandals. Guh. He has hairy feet and narrow toes. She digs around in her bag and takes out “A Tale of Two Cities,” but she isn’t allowed to put the tray down yet and the book is heavy and the canned air is making her chilly. Ah, screw it. She’ll close her eyes through the boring stuff: flight safety, weather update, taxiing, and then the liftoff rush. Her eyes flutter open and she sees an attendant going around offering complimentary newspapers. Aisle Guy grabs a Financial Times. He frowns at it, then turns to Charity and grins at her, a dadlike grin, crinkles blossoming around his mouth and eyes. “What do you think the odds are of finding anything in here I care about?” he says. “What?” she says. “I don’t . . .” His eyes are a washed-out green. The world feels crude and unfocussed, a bad sketch of itself. And she was wrong a moment earlier: he does not look like anyone’s dad. “The future of the rupee,” he says, laughing—to himself? At her? “Interest rates. Taiwan.” But then, as abruptly as he’s engaged her, a headline in the paper catches his interest and he disappears behind the salmon curtain, leaving her alone with Fat Hawaii, who stinks of sweat and is studying SkyMall like it’s the lost fifth Gospel. “A Tale of Two Cities” is still splayed open in Charity’s lap. She shoves it into the seat-back pocket, half hoping she’ll forget it there. She reclines her seat its measly inch and closes her eyes again. She wakes some time later to sunlight on her face: Fat Hawaii’s window shade is up, and her vision is a sea of burnt orange, with swimmers of emerald and gold. At some point she must’ve slumped over—she can feel the armrest she shares with Aisle Guy digging into her ribs. He has his tray table down: empty Styrofoam cup, two crumpled pretzel bags, and a pile of documents, the pink newspaper beneath. He’s leafing through the documents with his left hand, so as not to disturb her, since she’s leaning on his right side. Her head, she’s coming to realize, is on his shoulder, like you’d do with a boyfriend or something. Her neck is cricked and her breast is squished against his bicep and she can feel his heat, can smell his cologne or soap or deodorant or whatever it is— Charity jolts herself upright. “Hey there, sleepyhead,” he says. “Can I, like, get out?” she says, her throat parched, her voice a whisper. Did she sleep with her mouth open? Christ, what if she’d snored—or drooled? Aisle Guy starts to do the leg-twist thing but then, thinking better of it, stands and steps into the aisle, but forward instead of backward, so he’s still in her way, and they have to shimmy past each other. She walks to the lavatory on unsteady legs, feeling watched by every passenger as she makes her half-stumbling progress, pins and needles singing hotly in her feet. Buy the print » There’s no question of going back to sleep, so she reads for a while. But she can’t keep Charles Darnay and Sydney Carton straight, and what does it matter? She has all week. She had planned to buy Wi-Fi for the flight but she slept so long it isn’t worth it now, plus she’d have to go to the back of the plane and ask her mom for the credit card. Eff that. She takes her phone and earbuds out of her bag and puts some music on. Thumbs whateverly at Candy Crush while she listens. But of course at the exact moment that the captain announces the initial descent Fat Hawaii says she needs to use the bathroom. Charity and Aisle Guy both have to get up. This time, at least, he stands in the right place and there’s room for everyone. “You live in Seattle?” he asks as they sit down. She has one earbud back in and the other waiting in her hand. “No, I’m visiting Grams—my grandmother. Me and my mom are. For, like, a week.” “I’m on the road,” he says. “Boston, Seattle, then Dallas. This whole month.” “O.K.,” Charity says, but then, feeling vaguely like she owes him, summons up a modicum of pity, clears her throat, and asks him about his job. “Oh, it’s boring. I don’t know if they teach you this in school, but boredom is where money comes from. You plant boredom and money grows.” “Dude, if that was true I’d be rich as hell.” “You get bored, do you?” She laughs—almost snorts. “Uh, yeah. They make all these movies about high school being whatever but then it’s just like—school. You know?” “I’m Mark,” he says. “What’s your name?” “Charity.” “Charity. That’s pretty.” She can feel her cheeks warming. “I don’t know.” “No, really. It is. You are.” “O.K. I mean, thank you. Thanks.” Mark reaches into his shirt pocket and produces a cream-colored rectangle and an expensive-looking pen. There’s a name and a title and an e-mail address and some logo printed on the front side—it does in fact look boring as hell—but then he flips it over. On the reverse side, he scribbles a phone number and a pair of words. His handwriting is crowded but precise. “This is my cell and where I’m staying,” he says, reaching across her lap to slip the card between the pages of “A Tale of Two Cities.” He pushes it all the way in until it disappears. Mark moves his hand away from the book, and Charity thinks he might fake-accidentally brush her breast, the way boys at school sometimes do. But Mark is not a schoolboy and instead palms her inner thigh and squeezes it, two pumps, the second one a hard one, his wrist digging against the crotch of her jeans. “Call me when you get bored, Charity,” he says. His pretzel breath hot on her cheek. Then Fat Hawaii is back and he stands to greet her and Charity has no choice but to follow suit. He ignores her for the rest of the flight, busying himself with his papers. Fat Hawaii prays loudly as the world rushes close out the window, then applauds when the plane touches down safely. As soon as they finish taxiing, Mark unbuckles his seat belt and steps into the aisle. He gets his bag down and holds it in front of him and looks straight ahead. In the terminal, he takes hurried strides, and the crowds swallow him. When her mom emerges, finally, they ask each other how the flight was and both say it was fine. “Did you sleep?” her mom asks. “No,” Charity says. “A little. You don’t need to worry about me.” She starts walking. They make their way through the teeming hall. Charity establishes herself in Grams’s basement; it’s only lightly finished, and the foldout cot isn’t super comfortable, but it beats sharing the guest room with her mom. The main thing is to avoid having to deal with anybody, which turns out to be easier than she thought it would be. After a couple of days she’s kind of stir-crazy. When she isn’t slogging through “A Tale of Two Cities,” she keeps her earbuds in and texts with Lexie, or sometimes with Evan, who’s this boy from school. She’s hung out with Evan a few times, and once, at a party, in an upstairs bathroom, let him get to second base. Under the shirt but over the bra. But lately this girl, Jenna, who goes to private school, is all over his Instagram. Not like in pictures with him, just hearting every single post and sometimes leaving “first!” as a comment, which for Jenna’s own sake Charity hopes is irony, but who can say. Lexie thinks Evan is a loser, which yeah maybe, but he’s funny and easy to be around, so if he texts her she usually texts him back, sometimes right away and sometimes after waiting some random amount of time. And sometimes, like right now, she texts him first. “My grams is losing it. All she does is clean the same clean shit. She’s like bleaching bleach.” It’s three hours later in Boston. Last period at school, which for Evan is study hall, so he’s either doodling in his notebook or messing around on his phone under the table, the latter, probably, since he texts her right back: “Whoa harsh.” Charity can’t tell if he means that what she’s dealing with is harsh or if she herself is being harsh, so she parries with a nonsensical string of emoji: a crystal ball, a party horn, four or five roosters, a smirking moon. The main mission of this trip is to see how bad things have got with Grams, and to try to figure out what should happen next. To get a sense of—and maybe some control over—Grams’s finances: bank accounts; stocks and bonds, if there are any; plus of course the mortgage and will situations. This would be slow going even if Grams, a fiercely independent woman, were at her best. Now that she’s forgetting stuff, she covers for her lapses with a viciousness that makes people scared to deal with her. Which is the point. Charity is used to seeing Grams once or twice a year—Christmas in Boston, maybe a weeklong visit to Seattle in the summer or over spring break. But Grams has mostly stopped travelling and, come to think of it, this is the first time they’ve made it out to see her in two or three years. Life is busy and money’s always tight and time gets away from you. That’s what her mom says. And that the important thing is they’re here now: spending quality time, getting the lay of the land. Charity’s scared that Grams might need to come live with them. She is an only child and doesn’t think that she can learn to share her space with someone who, while obviously the opposite of a child, will increasingly have a child’s needs and make a child’s demands. She hopes Grams can go live with Aunt Jan and Uncle Dennis in Florida. They have a big house all to themselves, since Kyle is away at college. Or maybe Grams will want to stay in Seattle and they’ll put her in a nursing home, though how would they pay for it and when would they ever visit her? The whole thing, when Charity tries to think about it, gets overwhelming really fast. She pushes it into a far corner of her mind and leaves it there, like how when she was a kid sometimes she’d want to help her mom clean the house but then get distracted between the broom part and the dustpan part, so the hair balls and dead bugs and other crud ended up heaped and forgotten in this nasty little pile in the corner, to be dealt with later—or else not. No further word from Evan. She puts her phone down and goes upstairs. “Hey, Jerky! You’re standing in the middle of my entrée!”Buy the print » Charity’s mom is going stir-crazy, too, apparently, because she suggests that they all head downtown and do some sightseeing. Grams has “The View” going at top volume on all the TVs: living room, bedroom, and the little countertop one in the kitchen, where she stands in her nightgown, plunging a mop into a bucket of hot water. Charity’s mom points out that the kitchen is spotless; the whole house is. “It may seem that way to you,” Grams says, “but some of us have different standards.” She hits the key words as though they were posts she’s driving into the ground. She means to raise a high, strong fence around herself and then cower inside it alone. “Will she be O.K.?” Charity asks as they get into Grams’s car, which Grams never drives anymore. The engine sputters to life as if roused from a long but restless sleep. “She’s made it this far,” her mom says. “The more immediate question is whether I’m going to be O.K.” “We,” Charity says. “Oh, Sweetie,” her mom says. “Don’t be dramatic. Of course you’re going to be O.K.” After the Space Needle they go to Pike Place, where Charity takes a picture of her mom taking a picture of a group of Asian tourists who are taking turns posing for pictures in front of the original Starbucks. She texts the picture to Lexie and then separately to Evan. She makes her mom buy her a smoothie from a juice stall and they walk over to a little park to share it, but they can’t find a spot far enough away from the homeless people so they go back to the market and shuffle up and down the row of stalls. Charity wants to go to the aquarium, which is right down the block. They even talked about it earlier, but now her mom doesn’t want to. She’s doing that thing Charity hates, where she pretends to weigh options when really her mind is already made up. “I dunno, Sweetie. Probably we should get back to Grams sooner than later, don’t you think. Maybe let’s give it a shot another day, ’kay.” Questions that don’t end in question marks—this means they’re never going to the aquarium. “Whatever,” Charity says. They walk back to the car on a different street from the one they came down. Charity, lost in sulky reverie, keeps her eyes on her shoes and the black-gummed sidewalk as they make their way up a steep hill that she is pleased to notice leaves her mom short of breath. At the top, waiting for a light to change, Charity looks up and is utterly shocked to see, on the façade of a building kitty-corner from where she stands, the words Mark wrote on his card, tall and cut from metal and brightly lit. She has meant to tell Lexie about Mark, has almost told her a few times, but then at the last second held back. Sharing her secret with her best friend would be fun in one way, but keeping it to herself—making it really her secret—is fun in a different way, at least for now. Besides, what if the story isn’t over yet? She’d rather tell it all when she gets home and can enjoy the pink shock flushing across Lexie’s face. He did what? And what did you do? Holy fuck, Char. Grams goes to bed after dinner and her mom isn’t long in following. Charity finds Mark’s card in her book. She punches his number into her phone but doesn’t hit Call. She stares at the digits glowing black and thin in the iPhone font. She presses Create New Contact and saves him as “Mark Perv.” She googles his area code: Phoenix. This tells her nothing. She could look up his company, but who cares? She maps his hotel and looks at the route suggestions. She scrolls through some photos of sample rooms. This is stupid. She sends Mark Perv a text that says, “Hey dude its charity from the plane” She reads her book for a while, relishing being the last person awake in the house. When this small but definitive luxury has spent itself she changes into terry-cloth shorts and a T-shirt and pads upstairs to the bathroom to brush her teeth. As she’s going back down, she sees an angelic haze rising through the darkness and knows that it must be her phone. Sure enough, there’s a text from Mark Perv. “So u bored?” She’s workshopping witty retorts when he texts again. “Whatre you wearing?” “Pajamas I guess, like a shirt” “Bra?” “Who sleeps in a bra?” “U near me?” “I’m in some suburb” “Tell me where ur at I’ll get a taxi” “Can’t cuz of my family” “I’ll pay for yours thats easy” “Really can’t . . . Maybe tmrw i dunno” “Can i get a pic then?” “What? No way!” “Cmon sumthing to look fwd to ur teasing me bad here” “Will u send one back?” “Now were talking” She lies down on the floor, knees in the air, as if preparing to do sit-ups. She’s pleased with her thighs, smooth and blanched pale by the camera flash, but that’s not enough, somehow, so she pulls her shirt up to show off her hip bones and the downslope of her abdomen, extends her legs into a pseudo-yoga pose, and tries again. Her purple-painted toenails like weird stars in the grainy basement sky. The picture, she thinks, looks like an American Apparel ad. Her shorts are blue with white piping, and, because of how she positioned herself, are taut around her crotch, the bulge of it clearly articulated and more than she’d intended to show. But it’s less revealing than some American Apparel ads, which are in, like, magazines and on the sides of buses, so whatever. She sends the picture to Mark. He replies with a closeup of the head of his cock, its skin nubbled and flushed, a shiny pearl of semen in the opening, which Charity has never before had occasion to notice is vertical, like a vagina. The tip of Mark’s penis looks like a tiny vagina. Charity puts her phone on silent and sticks it down at the bottom of her purse. She needs a minute to think, or rather to not think, about some choices she is somewhat pleased to now have, but does not necessarily want to make right away. I’m gonna do whatever I’m gonna do, she thinks, and takes out “A Tale of Two Cities,” knowing she won’t be able to concentrate on it, but trying to anyway. One word and then the next, like rungs on a ladder. Sentences, paragraphs, pages. The revolution happens and everyone has such high hopes but then it all gets terrible. She puts the book down at the end of a chapter and wills herself to sleep. The next morning she checks her phone and sees that the battery died during the night. She plugs it in and goes upstairs. Back home Lexie and Evan are already at lunch. Charity feels outside of time and the world a little, which is scary but also cool, and if it’s true then maybe things that happen here in this other time register differently, matter less—or more, which is also possible—on the, like, cosmic or whatever scale. She finds Grams seated at the kitchen table and joins her. Grams is holding a slice of toasted Pepperidge Farm white bread over a china saucer. No coffee cup or coffee to be seen. “So he’s gone, then,” Grams says, putting the toast down. “Huh?” “I guess you wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t. Well, I’m sorry for you, sorrier for the baby, but not half sorry to see the last of that piece of shit. And it will be the last, or pretty nearly. You’ll be lucky if he sends Charity a birthday card, much less child support.” “Grams,” she says. “I’m Charity.” Grams slams the heel of her hand on the table, sending the toast and the saucer crashing to the floor. “Moooooom,” Charity cries, her voice rising like a siren, sounding even to her own ears like that of a frightened child. Her mom emerges, a few long seconds later, bleary and grumbling, from the guest room, and this seems to calm Grams; her lucidity returns like a dislocated joint pulled back into place. Charity, her eyes wet, walks across the kitchen. She pulls a paper towel off the roll and runs it under the faucet, then kneels to clean the shards of toast and china from the floor. Grams announces that she is going to her room to get dressed. It’s well past time, she says, to start the day. When the bedroom door closes, Charity’s mom grabs the cordless phone from its wall-mounted cradle and starts making calls—the G.P. first, then the neurologist, and then Aunt Jan. Charity finishes cleaning up, then goes downstairs to recover her aloofness and get dressed, too. When she gets back upstairs, Grams is still in her room, maybe hiding from them, while her mom sits at the kitchen table. There is a gray burst at the crown of her mom’s head, and Charity knows that this is because her mom’s regular appointment with the colorist had to be rescheduled. Because some things can be put off and others can’t, or can’t anymore. Her mom’s fingertips are at her temples, the cordless trapped between her ear and her shoulder as she stares down at a yellow scratch pad on which nothing is yet written. Charity says she wants to go downtown and see the aquarium. Her mom puts her hand over the mouthpiece of the phone; a pointless gesture, since she’s on hold. “Take two twenties from my purse. Check in in two hours. ’Kay?” “Mom.” “Charity.” They might have gone on like this, but then whoever has her mom on hold comes back on the line. The pen starts moving across the paper. Charity’s sneakers are by the front door. As she laces and ties them, she thinks about going back into the kitchen, sitting down with her mom. She can almost see herself doing it. But she has her sliver of freedom to protect, a day of her own ahead of her. “Love you,” she calls out, then leaves without waiting for a reply. On the light rail Charity has a whole bench to herself. She stretches her legs across the seats, then wriggles the phone out of her jeans pocket and turns it on. There are literally dozens of texts from Mark Perv waiting for her, which is both surprising and not. She expected something from him, had been perhaps counting on something, but this is above and beyond. She scrolls up to the beginning and reads in order. First he sent another shot of his junk, with the balls in it this time, then he asked for more pictures from Charity. His requests are super specific! They read like doctor’s instructions—open wide—or the rules of some ridiculous game. But, if this is a game, Charity thinks with rising indignation, Mark has cheated. They’ve barely begun playing and here he’s gone and skipped all her turns. His messages go from sweetly solicitous to powerfully angry, then back again. He accuses her of misleading him and calls her all sorts of names, then suddenly regains himself, tries to feign a degree of belated cool. He says he’s sorry if he scared her or came on too strong; she can trust him. It’s O.K.—really, honest—if she needs time to think. But also she’s a stupid little bitch playing with fire and bound to get burned. He’s going to fuck her ass so hard that when she goes back to the airport she’ll need a wheelchair. Jesus, she thinks. Next he’ll be offering to push the wheelchair. The last text, sent after a few hours’ lapse, is time-stamped 5:57 A.M. “So yr just what gone while im risk EVERTHING? so fuckin lame” She imagines the thunder of Mark’s blood in his ears as he harangued and pleaded. She wonders if he will hear that thunder again when his life comes crashing down around him—that is, if she reports him, which she knows she should. She knows the guidance-counsellor language for what is happening here. But ratting out Mark will mean telling the story, having to explain herself, over and over, to anyone who can make her tell it, cops and her mom, kids at school, after word gets out. Evan, for example, who, come to think of it, still hasn’t texted her back. She thinks about texting him: So you’re just what, gone? The Mark thing will make so much less sense out loud than it did when she did it, or even than it does now as she goes over it in her head. That’s the most unfair part. Everyone will have their own version of “What were you thinking?” and “Why did you do that?” Like her life is some book she needs to write a report about, identifying key themes and meaning, when, really, texting Mark was like peeking in the doorway of a bar or the teachers’ lounge—someplace you could get in trouble for going into but were curious to glimpse the inside of, just to be able to say that you knew what was in there. And maybe someone had dared you to do it and maybe you had had to dare yourself. The aquarium is mobbed with schoolkids on a field trip, seven- and eight-year-olds in yellow polo shirts with a crest stitched over the breast. They stick their hands in the touch pools, stroking anemones, spiny urchins, and orange starfish you can see moving only if you look close. Gray stingrays, their venom removed, jockey for position as they take laps around a tank. Kids reach in to swipe at them as they go past. When the tour guide calls the kids to attention and starts talking about the different kinds of sea life, Charity finds herself listening, following along as they make their way through the main hall to an outdoor pool, where some otters are playing in the sun. An employee emerges from a door in the back wall, carrying a bucket of cut-up fish. Charity figures he’ll make the otters do tricks for pieces, but instead he takes the bucket in both hands and swings it. With her phone, she takes a perfect shot of the mass as it unfurls over the water in a hail of innards and scales. She turns her back on the feasting otters, moves away from the kids. She opens her mouth as wide as it will go and retracts her tongue, like an eel in its lair. She puts the phone in her mouth, its glass face clicking against the back of her top front teeth, warm metal resting on her lower lip. She takes a picture. The roof of her mouth is a spidery pink dome. Below it, the curve of her tongue is a half-sunk moon casting a shadow into the gulp of her throat, above which her uvula hangs like a second moon, a full one, this alien world within her, shining like surgery. She pairs the two pictures together in a single Instagram post, no filters. She tags Lexie and Evan and some of their friends, plus private-school Jenna and, for good measure, a few total strangers who somehow or other found her feed and, for whatever reason, became her followers. Fish gutz / my gutz: Compare & contrast.

When I died, there was no one around to see it. I died all alone. It’s fine. Some people think it’s a great tragedy to die all alone, with no one around to see it. My high-school boyfriend wanted to marry me, because he thought the most important thing to have in life was a witness. To marry your high-school girlfriend, and have her with you all through life—that is a lot of witnessing. Everything important would be witnessed by one woman. I didn’t like his idea of what a wife was for—someone to just hang around and watch your life unfold. But I understand him better now. It is no small thing to have someone who loves you see your life, and discuss it with you every night. Instead of marrying him, I married no one. We broke up. I lived alone. I had no children. I was the only witness to my life, while he found a woman to marry, then had a child using fertility. Her family of origin is large and lives near them—same with his family of origin. I visited them one time, and at his birthday dinner there were thirty relatives and close friends, including their only child. We were at the home of his wife’s parents, in the small coastal town where they were building their lives. He got exactly what he wanted. He has thirty reliable witnesses. Even if half of them die or move away or come to hate him, he still has fifteen. When he dies, he will be surrounded by a loving family, who will remember when he still had hair. Who will remember every night that he came home stinking drunk and yelling. Who will remember his every failure, and love him in spite of it all. When all his witnesses die, his life will be over. When his son is dead, and his son’s wife is dead, and the children of his son are also dead, the life of my first boyfriend will be through. When I drew my last breath, no one saw me. The car that hit me drove quickly away, and a driver stopped to carry me out of the center of the road. I was already dead when he carried me, so I can say I died alone. Now, you can probably tell that I’m lying. If I really am O.K. with the fact that no one I loved witnessed my death, why did I come all the way back here from the dead? Why did I put on the flesh of my body, and the clothes I wore my last day on earth? Why did I resume the voice I spoke with when I was living, and return to the weight I was at the time of my death? I even washed the dirt out of my eyes and my hair, settled my teeth in the places in my mouth where they were before they got knocked out. Why did I bother doing that? It was a lot of work. I could have stayed in the ground for eternity. I could have stayed there, disintegrating, if I felt that my life was resolved. If there had not been a twinge of anxiety in me that something still needed to be said, I would still be in the ground. Here is the thing: I was a joke, and my life was a joke. The last man I loved—not my high-school boyfriend—told me this during our final fight. I was thirty-four at the time. During the fight, as I was trying to explain my version of things, he shouted, “You are a joke, and your life is a joke!” The night before, we loved each other still. We went to bed at the same time, and, as he read a popular crime novel on his phone, I fell asleep on my pillow, gently touching his arm. A few days later, I died. It has taken me since that time—four years—to understand the full significance of what he said: that I was a joke and my life was a joke. At the moment he said it, I didn’t know how to reply. I was so hurt, I just began bawling. This only proved to him that he was correct. I stared at him with an open mouth. Of course, I was used to his cruelties by then, but still it hurt. When I received your invitation to come speak here tonight—Didn’t you know I had died? You did not—when I received your invitation, at first I thought, No, I cannot come. The truth is I had no reason to. But then a few months later I wrote you a note: I’ll come if you’ll pay to dig me up. If you’ll pay to fly my corpse across North America, from where I am buried, and wheel me to the mike stand, then yes, I’ll come. As I flew, I worked so hard to keep in my dead brain what I wanted to say—it was the whole reason I’d said yes. I had something important to declare. What was it? Have I said it already? Thoughts slip from a dead brain so quickly. I can’t remember if I said it. “Ooh, are those Reese’s Pieces?”Buy the print » Lying there under the ground, salt and soil and sweat and worms and seedlings and saplings and the bones of dried birds collecting in my mouth, and my blood caked dry, and my toes curled up, and my brain filled with hair and the feathers of birds, and the little white balls of whatever it is that sometimes specks the soil—those little Styrofoam balls—and the shit of dogs, and the piss of skunks, and the seedlings and the saplings and the acorns and the raisins; it is so amazing I could think down there, in that total, wet darkness. You never know, lying in the ground, what your niggling thought will be. You can take only one thought with you to the grave, and invariably it is a thought that bugs you, something that must be thought all the way through to the end before you find your peace. The thought I took was of a man I loved saying, “You are a joke, and your life is a joke.” It cleaved to my head and my muscles and my bones, until I was nothing but those words. When my life collapsed inward—which is what death is, life collapsing deep into itself—that phrase remained outside the collapsing; it became a thing separate from me. And, because it was separate from me, I could take it with me—it was the only thing I had. Could I have a glass of water, please? Where is my water? I am parched and I am dead. Tomorrow I will be on an airplane home, down there with all the luggage, peace in my bones, having declared what I came here to declare—what I realized when I was underground. Then I will be dead for the rest of eternity, never having to brush myself off. The man who said I was a joke and my life was a joke—he may not have been there in my final moments, witnessing my final breath, but what I realized was: he foretold my death. He could only have foretold it by seeing me to my core—by having been my soul’s witness. When he said those awful words, he witnessed me into the future, a future he knew I would meet. During our fight, I tried to convince him that he was wrong. “I’m not a joke!” I cried. “You’re the joke! You’re the joke!” When a person slips on a banana peel and dies, then her life is a joke. Slipping on a banana peel is not how I died. When a person walks into a bar with a rabbi, a priest, and a nun, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. That is not how I died. When a person is a chicken who crosses the road to get to the other side, and that is how she dies, then her life is a joke. Well, that is how I died—as a chicken crossing the road to get to the other side. When I crossed the road that day, it was to the other side I was heading—that was how much despair I felt, our fight still in my mind. Why did the chicken cross the road? To get to the other side. A suicide. The other side is death. Everyone knows that, right? I scurried out in front of that rusty old car, and smashed myself into the metal, my teeth pushed back into my throat by the fender, my chest completely run over. I didn’t come here to depress you. I came here to tell you a joke. Or, rather, to show you a joke. Me! And to brag that I was witnessed. That first boyfriend of mine—he doesn’t live far from here. Perhaps he is in the audience, listening? Having a beer? I hope he’s here! My life and death were witnessed, I tell you! Witnessed and foretold! You did not fare any better than me. It seems both of us won, in the end. What a chicken I was. I couldn’t bear any aspect of living. Especially that old custom: that you have to live a better life than everyone else. What is the other side like, you may be wondering. Since I’m here, I might as well tell you: it’s a ridiculous place where everyone is always laughing. It’s like something I experienced once, on a transcontinental flight. This woman beside me laughed at every dumb joke in whatever show she was watching, literally every joke the show made. Then she watched another show, then another one. Her laughter filled our row of seats. She didn’t stop laughing from takeoff to landing. How a person’s laughter can make you hate her! Don’t the laughers of the world know this? Do they think it makes them lovable? Who likes to hear someone laughing to herself, headphones on, while staring at a screen? Probably the same people who like to listen to strangers fuck behind a hotel wall. Over there on the other side, it’s like that all the time—the dogs laugh, the trees laugh, everyone laughs—whether there’s anything funny or not. I practiced this speech on the other side, before an audience of sixteen people, and it took four hours, from beginning to end, as I waited after saying each sentence for the laughter to subside. Here on earth it is different, of course. The quiet of the living is one of the great reliefs. Is death the same for everyone, or is this laughing world a death made just for me? How can I know for sure? Does anything I’m saying make any sense? I’m self-conscious about my speaking. Does my voice sound all right? When you are dead, it’s difficult to carry a thought. My head feels stuffed with cotton batting; my eyes feel stuffed with cotton balls; my ears feel plugged up with cotton. It is hard to think, to string meaning to meaning. I did not come here to tell you I love you. Is that what you think I am saying? I only loved two men ever. One of them wanted to marry me, and the other thought my life was a joke. My first boyfriend found himself a witness, and I have come to declare that I found one, too. I won, you see? I won! I won the best thing a person can win—to be seen! I declare it here today. It’s the only reason I crawled into my flesh to stand here before you—a joke on this stage. His words no longer hurt me. They make me feel so proud. Why did the chicken cross the road? That’s me. I am the chicken. And I got to the other side. He knew this would happen when he spoke those words. How beautiful to be seen.

Alain meditates on the navel. It was the month of June, the morning sun was emerging from the clouds, and Alain was walking slowly down a Paris street. He observed the young girls: every one of them showed her naked navel between trousers belted very low and a T-shirt cut very short. He was captivated, captivated and even disturbed: it was as if their seductive power resided no longer in their thighs, their buttocks, or their breasts but in that small round hole at the center of the body. This provoked him to reflect: if a man (or an era) sees the thighs as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: the length of the thighs is the metaphoric image of the long, fascinating road (which is why the thighs must be long) that leads to erotic achievement. Indeed, Alain said to himself, even in mid-coitus the length of the thighs endows woman with the romantic magic of the inaccessible. If a man (or an era) sees the buttocks as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: brutality, high spirits, the shortest road to the goal, a goal that is all the more exciting for being double. If a man (or an era) sees the breasts as the center of female seductive power, how does one describe and define the particularity of that erotic orientation? He improvised an answer: sanctification of woman, the Virgin Mary suckling Jesus, the male sex on its knees before the noble mission of the female sex. But how does one define the eroticism of a man (or an era) that sees female seductive power as centered in the middle of the body, in the navel? So: ambling along the streets, he would often think about the navel, untroubled at repeating himself, and even strangely obstinate about doing so, for the navel woke in him a distant memory: the memory of his last encounter with his mother. He was ten at the time. He and his father were alone on vacation, in a rented villa with a garden and a swimming pool. It was the first time that she had come to see them after an absence of several years. They closed themselves into the villa, she and her former husband. For miles around, the atmosphere was stifling from it. How long did she stay? Probably not more than an hour or two, during which time Alain tried to entertain himself in the pool. He had just climbed out when she paused there to say her goodbyes. She was alone. What did they say to each other? He doesn’t know. He remembers only that she was sitting on a garden chair and that he, in his still-wet bathing trunks, stood facing her. What they said is forgotten, but one moment is fixed in his memory, a concrete moment, sharply etched: from her chair, she gazed intently at her son’s navel. He still feels that gaze on his belly. A gaze that was difficult to understand: it seemed to him to express an inexplicable mix of compassion and contempt; the mother’s lips had taken the shape of a smile (a smile of compassion and contempt together); then, without rising from the chair, she leaned toward him and, with her index finger, touched his navel. Immediately afterward, she stood up, kissed him (did she really kiss him? probably, but he is not sure), and was gone. He never saw her again. A woman steps out of her car A small car moves along the road beside a river. The chilly morning air makes even more forlorn the charmless terrain, somewhere between the end of a suburb and open country, where houses grow scarce and no pedestrians are to be seen. The car stops at the side of the road; a woman gets out—young, quite beautiful. A strange thing: she pushes the door shut so negligently that the car must not be locked. What is the meaning of that negligence, so improbable these days with thieves about? Is the woman so distracted? No, she doesn’t seem distracted; on the contrary, determination is visible on her face. This woman knows what she wants. This woman is pure will. She walks some hundred yards along the road, toward a bridge over the river, a rather high, narrow bridge, forbidden to vehicles. She steps onto it and heads toward the far bank. Several times she looks around, not like a woman expected by someone but to be sure that there is no one expecting her. Midway across the bridge, she stops. At first glance she appears to be hesitating, but, no, it’s not hesitation or a sudden flagging of determination; on the contrary, it’s a pause to sharpen her concentration, to make her will steelier yet. Her will? To be more precise: her hatred. Yes, the pause that looked like hesitation is actually an appeal to her hatred to stand by her, to support her, not to desert her for an instant. She lifts a leg over the railing and flings herself into the void. At the end of her fall, she slams brutally against the hardness of the water’s surface and is paralyzed by the cold, but after a few long seconds she lifts her face, and since she is a good swimmer all her automatic responses surge forward against her will to die. She plunges her head under again, forces herself to inhale water, to block her breathing. Suddenly, she hears a shout. A shout from the far bank. Someone has seen her. She understands that dying will not be easy, and that her greatest enemy will be not her good swimmer’s irrepressible reflex but a person she had not figured on. She will have to fight. Fight to rescue her death. She kills She looks over toward the shout. Someone has leaped into the river. She considers: who will be quicker, she, in her resolve to stay underwater, to take in water, to drown herself, or he, the oncoming figure? When she is half-drowned, with water in her lungs and thus weakened, won’t she be all the easier prey for her savior? He will pull her toward the bank, lay her out on the ground, force the water out of her lungs, apply mouth-to-mouth, call the rescue squad, the police, and she will be saved and ridiculed forevermore. “Stop! Stop!” the man shouts. Everything has changed. Instead of diving down beneath the water, she raises her head and breathes deeply to collect her strength. He is already in front of her. It’s a young fellow, a teenager, who hopes to be famous, to have his picture in the papers. He just keeps repeating, “Stop! Stop!” He’s already reaching a hand toward her, and she, rather than evading it, grasps it, grips it tight, and pulls it (and him) down toward the depths of the river. Again he cries, “Stop!” as if it were the only word he can speak. But he will not speak it again. She holds on to his arm, draws him toward the bottom, then stretches the whole length of her body along the boy’s back to keep his head underwater. He fights back, he thrashes, he has already inhaled water, he tries to strike the woman, but she stays lying firmly on top of him; he cannot lift his head to get air, and after several long, very long, seconds he ceases to move. She holds him like that for a while; it is as if, exhausted and trembling, she were resting, laid out along him. Then, convinced that the man beneath her will not stir again, she lets go of him and turns away, toward the riverbank she came from, so as not to preserve within her even the shadow of what has just occurred. But what’s going on? Has she forgotten her resolve? Why does she not drown herself, since the person who tried to rob her of her death is no longer alive? Why, now that she is free, does she no longer seek to die? Buy the print » Life unexpectedly recovered has been a kind of shock that broke her determination; she has lost the strength to concentrate her energy on dying. She is shaking, suddenly stripped of any will, any vigor; mechanically, she swims toward the place where she abandoned the car. She returns to the house Little by little, she feels the water grow less deep, she touches her feet to the riverbed, she stands; she loses her shoes in the mud and hasn’t the strength to search for them; she leaves the water barefoot and climbs the bank to the road. The rediscovered world has an inhospitable appearance, and suddenly anxiety seizes her: she hasn’t got the car key! Where is it? Her skirt has no pockets. Heading for your death, you don’t worry about what you’ve dropped along the way. When she left the car, the future did not exist. She had nothing to hide. Whereas now, suddenly, she has to hide everything. Leave no trace. Her anxiety grows stronger and stronger: Where is the key? How to get home? She reaches the car, she pulls at the door, and, to her astonishment, it opens. The key awaits her, abandoned on the dashboard. She sits at the wheel and sets her naked feet on the pedals. She is still shaking. Now she is shaking with cold as well. Her shirt, her skirt, are drenched, with dirty river water running everywhere. She turns the key and drives off. The person who tried to impose life on her has died from drowning, and the person she was trying to kill in her belly is still alive. The idea of suicide is ruled out forever. No repeats. The young man is dead, the fetus is alive, and she will do all she can to keep anyone from discovering what has happened. She is shaking, and her will revives; she thinks of nothing but her immediate future: How to get out of the car without being seen? How to slip, unnoticed, in her dripping clothes, past the concierge’s window? Alain felt a violent blow on his shoulder. “Watch out, you idiot!” He turned and saw a girl passing him on the sidewalk with a rapid, energetic stride. “Sorry!” he cried after her (in his frail voice). “Asshole!” she answered (in her strong voice) without turning around. The apologizers Alone in his studio apartment two days later, Alain noticed that he was still feeling pain in his shoulder, and he decided that the young woman who had jostled him in the street so effectively must have done it on purpose. He could not forget her strident voice calling him “idiot,” and he heard again his own supplicating “Sorry,” followed by the answering “Asshole!” Once again, he had apologized over nothing! Why always this stupid reflex of begging pardon? The memory would not leave him, and he felt he had to talk to someone. He called his girlfriend, Madeleine. She wasn’t in Paris, and her cell phone was off. So he punched in Charles’s number, and no sooner did he hear his friend’s voice than he apologized. “Don’t be angry. I’m in a very bad mood. I need to talk.” “It’s a good moment. I’m in a foul mood, too. But why are you?” “Because I’m angry with myself. Why is it that I find every opportunity to feel guilty?” “That’s not so awful.” “Feeling guilty or not feeling guilty—I think that’s the whole issue. Life is a struggle of all against all. It’s a known fact. But how does that struggle work in a society that’s more or less civilized? People can’t just attack each other on sight. So instead they try to cast the shame of culpability on each other. The person who manages to make the other one guilty will win. The one who confesses his crime will lose. You’re walking along the street, lost in thought. Along comes a girl, walking straight ahead, as if she were the only person in the world, looking neither left nor right. You jostle each other. And there it is, the moment of truth: Who’s going to bawl out the other person, and who’s going to apologize? It’s a classic situation: actually, each of them is both the jostled and the jostler. And yet some people always—immediately, spontaneously—consider themselves the jostlers, and thus in the wrong. And others always—immediately, spontaneously—consider themselves the jostled, and therefore in the right, quick to accuse the other and get him punished. What about you—in that situation, would you apologize or accuse?” “Me, I’d certainly apologize.” “Ah, my poor friend, so you, too, belong to the army of apologizers. You expect to mollify the other person with your apologies.” “Absolutely.” “And you’re wrong. The person who apologizes is declaring himself guilty. And if you declare yourself guilty you encourage the other to go on insulting you, blaming you, publicly, unto death. Such are the inevitable consequences of the first apology.” “That’s true. One should not apologize. And yet I prefer a world where everyone would apologize, with no exception, pointlessly, excessively, for nothing at all, where they’d load themselves down with apologies.” Alain picked up his cell phone to call Madeleine again. But hers rang and rang in vain. As he often did at similar moments, he turned his attention to a photograph hanging on his wall. There was no photograph in his studio but that one: the face of a young woman—his mother. A few months after Alain’s birth, she had left her husband, who, given his discreet ways, had never spoken ill of her. He was a subtle, gentle man. The child did not understand how a woman could have abandoned a man so subtle and gentle, and understood even less how she could have abandoned her son, who was also (as he was aware) since childhood (if not since his conception) a subtle, gentle person. “Where does she live?” he had asked his father. “Probably in America.” “What do you mean, ‘probably’?” “I don’t know her address.” “But it’s her duty to give it to you.” “She has no duty to me.” “But to me? She doesn’t want to hear news of me? She doesn’t want to know what I’m doing? She doesn’t want to know that I think about her?” One day, the father lost control. “Since you insist, I’ll tell you: your mother never wanted you to be born. She never wanted you to be around here, to be burying yourself in that easy chair where you’re so comfortable. She wanted nothing to do with you. So now do you understand?” The father was not an aggressive man. But, despite his great reserve, he had not managed to hide his profound disagreement with a woman who had tried to keep a human being from coming into the world. I have already described Alain’s last encounter with his mother, beside the swimming pool of a rented vacation house. He was ten at the time. He was sixteen when his father died. A few days after the funeral, he tore a photograph of his mother out of a family album, had it framed, and hung it on his wall. Why was there no picture of his father in his apartment? I don’t know. Is that illogical? Certainly. Unfair? Without a doubt. But that’s how it is. On the walls of his studio, there hung only a single photograph: the one of his mother. With which, from time to time, he would talk. How to give birth to an apologizer “Why didn’t you have an abortion? Did he stop you?” A voice came to him from the photograph: “You’ll never know that. Everything you imagine about me is just fairy tales. But I love your fairy tales. Even when you made me out to be a murderer who drowned a young man in the river. I liked it all. Keep it up, Alain. Tell me a story! Go on, imagine! I’m listening.” “We must root out corruption at the highest levels of government and make it look like it’s happening at the lowest levels of government.”Buy the print » And Alain imagined. He imagined the father on his mother’s body. Before their coitus, she’d warned him: “I didn’t take the pill, be careful!” He reassured her. So she makes love without mistrust, then, when she sees the signs of climax appear on the man’s face and grow, she cries, “Watch out!” then “No! No! I don’t want to! I don’t want to!” But the man’s face is redder and redder, red and repugnant; she pushes at the heavier weight of this body clamping her against it, she fights, but he wraps her still tighter, and she suddenly understands that for him this is not the blindness of passion but will—cold, premeditated will—while for her it is more than will, it is hatred, a hatred all the more ferocious because the battle is lost. This was not the first time Alain had imagined their coitus; this coitus hypnotized him and caused him to suppose that every human being was the exact replica of the instant of its conception. He stood at his mirror and examined his face for traces of the double, simultaneous hatreds that had led to his birth: the man’s hatred and the woman’s hatred at the moment of the man’s orgasm, the hatred of the gentle and physically strong coupled with the hatred of the courageous and physically weak. And he reflects that the fruit of that double hatred could only be an apologizer. He was gentle and intelligent like his father; and he would always be an intruder, as his mother had viewed him. A person who is both an intruder and gentle is condemned, by an implacable logic, to apologize throughout his whole life. He looked at the face hanging on the wall and once again he saw the woman who, defeated, in her dripping dress, gets into the car, slips unnoticed past the concierge’s window, climbs the staircase, and, barefoot, returns to the apartment where she will stay until the intruder leaves her body. And where, a few months later, she will abandon the two of them. Eve’s tree Alain was sitting on the floor of his studio, leaning against the wall, his head bent low: Perhaps he had dozed off? A female voice woke him. “I like everything you’ve said to me so far, I like everything you’re inventing, and I have nothing to add. Except, maybe, about the navel. To your mind, the model of a navel-less woman is an angel. For me, it’s Eve, the first woman. She was born not out of a belly but out of a whim, the Creator’s whim. It was from her vulva, the vulva of a navel-less woman, that the first umbilical cord emerged. If I’m to believe the Bible, other cords, too: with a little man or a little woman attached to each of them. Men’s bodies were left with no continuation, completely useless, whereas from out of the sexual organ of every woman there came another cord, with another woman or man at the end of each one, and all of that, millions and millions of times over, turned into an enormous tree, a tree formed from the infinity of bodies, a tree whose branches reached to the sky. Imagine! That gigantic tree is rooted in the vulva of one little woman, the first woman, poor navel-less Eve. “When I got pregnant, I saw myself as a part of that tree, dangling from one of its cords, and you, not yet born—I imagined you floating in the void, hooked to the cord coming out of my body, and from then on I dreamed of an assassin way down below, slashing the throat of the navel-less woman. I imagined her body in death throes, decomposing, until that whole enormous tree that grew out of her—now suddenly without roots, without a base—started to fall. I saw the infinite spread of its branches come down like a gigantic cloudburst, and—understand me—what I was dreaming of wasn’t the end of human history, the abolition of any future; no, no, what I wanted was the total disappearance of mankind, together with its future and its past, with its beginning and its end, along with the whole span of its existence, with all its memory, with Nero and Napoleon, with Buddha and Jesus. I wanted the total annihilation of the tree that was rooted in the little navel-less belly of some stupid first woman who didn’t know what she was doing or what horrors we’d pay for her miserable coitus, which had certainly not given her the slightest pleasure.” The mother’s voice went silent, and Alain, leaning against the wall, dozed off again. Dialogue on the motorbike The next morning, at about eleven, Alain was to meet with his friends Ramon and Caliban in front of the museum near the Luxembourg Gardens. Before he left his studio, he turned back to say goodbye to his mother in the photograph. Then he went down to the street and walked toward his motorbike, which was parked not far from his apartment. As he straddled the bike, he had the vague sensation of a body leaning against his back. As if Madeleine were with him and touching him lightly. The illusion moved him; it seemed to express the love he felt for his girl. He started the engine. Then he heard a voice behind him: “I wanted to talk some more.” No, it wasn’t Madeleine; he recognized his mother’s voice. Traffic was slow, and he heard: “I want to be sure that there’s no confusion between you and me, that we understand each other completely—” He had to brake. A pedestrian had slipped between cars to cross the street and turned toward Alain with a threatening gesture. “I’ll be frank. I’ve always felt that it’s horrible to send a person into the world who didn’t ask to be there.” “I know,” Alain said. “Look around you. Of all the people you see, no one is here by his own wish. Of course, what I just said is the most banal truth there is. So banal, and so basic, that we’ve stopped seeing it and hearing it.” For several minutes he kept to a lane between a truck and a car that were pressing him from either side. “Everyone jabbers about human rights. What a joke! Your existence isn’t founded on any right. They don’t even allow you to end your life by your own choice, these defenders of human rights.” The light at the intersection went red. He stopped. Pedestrians from both sides of the street set out toward the opposite sidewalk. And the mother went on: “Look at them all! Look! At least half the people you’re seeing are ugly. Being ugly—is that one of the human rights, too? And do you know what it is to carry your ugliness with you through your whole life? With not a moment of relief? Or your sex? You never chose that. Or the color of your eyes? Or your era on earth? Or your country? Or your mother? None of the things that matter. The rights a person can have involve only pointless things, for which there is no reason to fight or to write great declarations!” He was driving again now, and his mother’s voice grew gentler. “You’re here as you are because I was weak. That was my fault. Forgive me.” Alain was silent; then he said, in a quiet voice: “What is it that you feel guilty for? For not having had the strength to prevent my birth? Or for not reconciling yourself to my life, which, as it happens, is actually not so bad?” After a silence, she answered, “Maybe you’re right. Then I’m doubly guilty.” “I’m the one who should apologize,” Alain said. “I dropped into your life like a cow turd. I chased you away to America.” “Quit your apologies! What do you know about my life, my little idiot! Can I call you idiot? Yes, don’t be angry; in my own opinion, you are an idiot! And you know where your idiocy comes from? From your goodness! Your ridiculous goodness!” He reached the Luxembourg Gardens. He parked the bike. “Don’t protest, and let me apologize,” he said. “I’m an apologizer. That’s the way you made me, you and he. And, as such, as an apologizer, I’m happy. I feel good when we apologize to each other, you and I. Isn’t it lovely, apologizing to each other?” Then they walked toward the museum.

I was living in the armory on Lexington Avenue. First Sergeant Diaz had given me the keys. I slept on a cot in the medical-supply closet. “Two weeks, max,” I’d told Diaz. But as the months went by I kept postponing a reunion with my wife. I was comfortable where I was. The armory took up an entire city block. There were secret passageways, subterranean firing ranges, a gym with an elliptical. At night, if drunk, I connected to a bag of saline. I always woke up hydrated. I never had a hangover. It was peacetime, more or less. It was for us, the New York National Guard, at least. Between drills, I worked as a paramedic for a hospital in Queens. My partner on the ambulance, Karen, had applied to the police academy. She wanted to be a detective. This, for me, was troublesome: as a rule, from every residence we visited I took stuff. Not valuable stuff. Small stuff. A spoon, say, or a refrigerator magnet. I’d never been caught. Still, ever since she sat for the civil-service exam Karen had been acting leery. Once, while checking for prescriptions in a diabetic man’s bathroom, I came across a plastic hand mirror, pink with black polka dots. I was about to shove it down my pants when I glimpsed Karen in its glass. (I brought it to my face, scrutinizing nose hairs.) Often, when I got back to midtown, Diaz would still be there. Most nights, I’d find him in his office, updating his conspiracy blog. “Take a look at this, Papadopoulos,” he’d say, turning his laptop around to show me a 3-D engineering schematic of Two World Trade Center, mid-collapse, with complex mathematical equations and swooping arrows indicating various structural details. “Huh,” I’d say. Then we’d head to a bar on Third Avenue. Diaz, in his uniform, with his limp, almost always met a woman. The limp was gold. As the woman watched Diaz hobble back to us with drinks, sloshing gin and tonic on the floor, I’d say, “Fucking Iraq.” She’d seldom ask me to elaborate. If she did, I wouldn’t tell her how, as a squad leader, Diaz contracted a bacterial infection while masturbating in a Port-a-John; how the infection spread up his urethra, into his testicles; how that made him lurch, causing a herniated disk, which resulted in sciatica. Instead, I’d say, “We lost a lot of good men over there.” Which happened to be true. If it had been up to Diaz, he’d have let me move my flat screen and futon into the supply closet. The problem was the new C.O. After shepherding the unit through 9/11, Baghdad, and Afghanistan, our old C.O., Captain Harris, had recently been promoted to brigade staff, in Syracuse. His replacement, Captain Finkbiner, was a former marine determined to show us guardsmen how a real infantry company did things. He had the kind of face that a shaved head did not flatter; the effect was less soldier, more chemo. Shortly after he assumed command, Finkbiner summoned me to his office, and I had the momentary notion—seeing him there in Captain Harris’s chair, behind Captain Harris’s desk, wearing Captain Harris’s rank—that he was a terminal case whose Make-A-Wish had been to be Captain Harris. “Papadopoulos,” he said. “What is that?” “My name,” I said. “Cute,” Finkbiner said. “So now I know who the joker is. The jackass. The clown.” There were no pictures of Mrs. Finkbiner on the desk, no baby Finkbiners. The sole decoration was a large mammalian jawbone, like a boomerang with teeth. I barely glanced at it. With a weary sigh, as if under pressure to share a story he’d rather have kept private, Finkbiner said, “All right, Jesus, O.K.,” and proceeded to explain that on his last tour in Helmand Province he’d been leading a patrol when a camel walked out from the trees. Twisting its neck, the animal regarded the marines. Then it turned and sauntered toward them. It was about halfway to Finkbiner, about thirty metres out, when, boom, no more camel. “Understand, Clown?” I smiled politely. In fact, I hadn’t really been listening. My own thoughts wanted attending. Just what was the age limit for those wishes, anyway? Were there people out there, afflicted people, who’d missed the cutoff by a week? A day? It was something someone should look into. There was an old Polish lady, Mrs. Olenski, who called 911 every Wednesday. She usually called during Tour Two, my and Karen’s shift. I looked forward to Wednesdays: first, because Mrs. Olenski always offered me oatmeal-raisin cookies; second, because she was extremely rude to Karen. The ritual started when her husband died. They’d been married for more than fifty years, no children. After Mr. Olenski went, the empty, silent apartment began to harrow Mrs. Olenski. Only the television helped. She left it on 24/7, full volume; it made no difference what channel or program. It made no difference because Mrs. Olenski hated television. The advertisements, the laughter—ridiculous. Every time we showed up, she switched it off, massaged her temples with her knotty finger bones, and muttered, “Thank God.” Then, as soon as we were out the door, on it went again. Her standard complaint was chest pain. I’d sit her on the gray suède couch, pull up the ottoman, and go through the motions: take her pulse and blood pressure, conduct a thorough medical history, provide oxygen. Meanwhile, Karen would stand off to the side, refusing to assist. Her feeling was that Mrs. Olenski abused the system and exploited city resources, and that I, by humoring her and eating her cookies, was complicit. Alive to Karen’s judgment, Mrs. Olenski directed all her old-lady kindness to me, sometimes ignoring Karen altogether, at other times behaving toward her with overt hostility. Once, while Velcroing the B.P. cuff around her arm (on that arm, you had to use the pediatric cuff), I noticed her finger writing something on the couch cushion, smoothing down the nap. For a moment, I thought that she’d suffered a stroke and wanted to convey the fact to me. I checked her face for droop. When I looked back at the message, it read “whor.” Later, in the bus, Karen said, “You think you’re being a good person, but you’re not. What you’re being is afraid. You’re afraid that’s you.” She was in the driver’s seat, one hand draped on the wheel, the other gloved by a bag of jalapeño Combos. Someday she was going to make a fine detective. “You should lay off the Combos,” I said. “Don’t cut my leathers,” Karen said. Don’t cut my leathers. Years before, we’d responded to a motor-vehicle accident on the B.Q.E. Law enforcement had cordoned off a lane. A snaking peel of tread led to a motorcycle wedged beneath the guardrail. A man writhed in a slick of blood. Somehow he’d managed to slide, rather than tumble, over the asphalt. Both buttocks were gone. While Karen prepped the stretcher and applied the collar, I got out my trauma shears. Until then, the guy had been only semiconscious, murmuring, in a daze, “My ass, man, my fucking ass.” Soon as I squeezed the scissors, though, he started, looked back at me, and said it. “Don’t cut my leathers.” After that, all the paramedics on Tour Two, and most of the nurses in the E.R., adopted the phrase. Its meaning was elastic. I often invoked it when the supervisor made us pull a double. Other instances included the time when we had to extricate an unresponsive three-hundred-pounder from his bathtub in a fifth-floor studio, then found the elevator broken; when a girl who’d stuck a Beretta in her mouth and pulled the trigger, her tongue stud having deflected the bullet straight down through the bottom of her chin, asked us were we angels; and when Karen, after a gas explosion in a textile factory, sneaked up behind me, whispered in my ear, “I’m keeping an eye on you,” and actually had an eye on me, on my shoulder, the nerve dangling like spaghetti. Some occasions, I didn’t say it but I thought it. Take, for instance, the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund requesting documentation of my alleged pulmonary disease, my wife suggesting I have a think about our marriage, or Finkbiner inviting me, with great ceremony, to touch his lucky camel bone. Take me recalling all the homes I’d visited, the misery inside them, the knickknacks I’d lifted. Mostly knickknacks. Every now and then I overreached. Once, at the Ridgedale Projects, we found a teen-age boy in a hoodie standing outside a red brick tower, wearing headphones and blowing bubblegum bubbles. “Did you call 911?” Karen asked. The boy shook his head. We’d already reached the elevator when he said, “Mom did.” On the way up, Karen said, “Is it your dad?” “Sort of,” the boy said. A grossly overweight woman wearing a terry-cloth bathrobe over a diaphanous nightgown over a brownish sweatsuit greeted us in the hall. “Done it again,” she said. We followed her into a cluttered apartment, where she began leisurely picking up toys off the floor, clucking with annoyance every time she bent over. Children watched an action film. None turned to look at us. The man was in the bedroom, supine on the covers. He was unusually small—his underwear, which was all he had on, looked baggy, diaperish—unconscious, and experiencing severe respiratory depression. Every ten seconds or so, he’d snort a gnarly breath through his nose, a terrific snore. His lips were blue, his skin devoid of oxygenated flush. The nightstand was covered with pill bottles: mostly painkillers, a lot of opioids. “For my aches,” the woman explained. “But did he think about that, either?” Karen went around to the far side of the bed with the O2 and the oropharyngeal airway. When she planted her knee on the mattress to lean over the man, the mattress gave beneath her, billowing out in liquid undulations, lifting him on its squishy swell. Karen pitched forward and the water continued to glug from one side of the bed to the other, raising and dropping her, the man. Ordinarily, this would have offered a supreme occasion to ridicule Karen; I was distracted, however. Among the pill bottles on the nightstand was a large fountain cup, no top, brown soda beads clinging to its waxed interior. Held down by the fountain cup was a handwritten note. “Papadopoulos,” Karen said. She’d managed to kind of calm the bed and was bobbing gently beside the man. I opened the drug box, prepared a bolus of naloxone, inserted the needle, and drove home the plunger. The action was almost instantaneous. While we were still trying to bounce him onto the backboard, the man began to gag on the airway and slap at the oxygen mask strapped to his face. By the time we’d transferred him to the stretcher, he was back in the world and not the least pleased. “Why’d you do that?” he asked us. “Oh, fuck you, Marty, you fucking shithead,” the woman said, quietly, and left the room. I rewarded the man with another hit of naloxone, which made him even more alive, even less happy. Karen was busy with the gear, and I thought for sure that the coast was clear. It wasn’t. As soon as I put the note in my pocket, I saw the boy. He stood in the doorway, watching me with a basically impassive expression. He chewed his gum. He blew a splendid bubble. “Let’s move,” Karen said, and the boy mutely watched us wheel his sort-of dad away. The note was all run-of-the-mill, derivative material. A lot of I love you so much, a lot of I’m so sorry. Still, after that day I carried it with me everywhere. If I drank too much, I’d sometimes knock over the I.V. stand during the night, inverting my gravitational relationship to the bag of saline. In the morning I’d find it jiggling on the floor, still hooked to my arm, full of my fluid. I’d raise the bag above my head and squeeze it in my fist until the whole pink cocktail drained back down the tubing, into me, where it belonged. I’d yank the catheter from my vein, sit up on my cot, stumble past the floor-to-ceiling shelves stocked with medical miscellany, enter the combination on the drug cabinet, and open her up. Typically, what I required was a vasodilator/muscle-relaxer medley: the former to stimulate cranial blood flow, the latter to break the grip of the savage claws sunk into my face, determined to unmask my skull. Often, I’d cough. If so, I’d scour the shelves for something to spit into—a bandage or some gauze or a sterile eye pad would do. I’d inspect the sample, a squashed bug on the white cotton, with satisfaction. I’d seal it in a biohazard bag. I’d write the date. One morning, the supply-closet door opened and Captain Finkbiner walked in. I gulped the pills in my palm, then turned to face him. He glared at me, Finkbiner, in his manner. He appeared to subscribe to the theory that if you wanted to unnerve a man you didn’t look him in the eye, you did the opposite: avoid the eye by looking at his earlobe. “Papaluffagus,” he said. I tried to say something respectful. One of the pills, however, had caught in my throat. “No jokes, Clown?” Finkbiner asked. “I was just doing inventory,” I said. “He was just doing inventory,” Finkbiner said, addressing my earlobe as if it were a neutral party, sympathetic to his contempt for me. Right then, First Sergeant Diaz joined us. He looked at me, looked at Finkbiner, looked back at me. He said, “Did you finish that inventory?” It was Saturday, a drill weekend. Soldiers were trickling in from Brooklyn, Harlem, Queens, the Bronx. I folded up my cot and gathered the medical platoon in a dark corner of the armory, out of view of the grunts. Nobody wanted to be there. Specialist Chen had brought a Box O’ Joe from Dunkin’ Donuts. We filled small paper cups and discussed the best way for me to dislodge the tablet from my esophagus. Sergeant Pavone seemed to have the most experience. A girl with whom he’d once engaged in unprotected sex had suffered the same problem with a morning-after pill. All day, Pavone had plied the girl with water and milk, hot tea, balled-up bread and honey. He’d massaged her neck, made her hop on one foot, held her upside down, commanded her to yodel. “So what worked?” I said. “Nothing.” “So what happened to her?” “Who?” “The girl.” “The girl with the pill?” “Yes.” “I hate to be that guy, but, technically, Frankenstein is the name of my creator, and I’m Frankenstein’s monster.”Buy the print » Pavone shrugged and sipped his coffee. It was peacetime, more or less. At 1300, we had a domestic-abuse-prevention training. At 1500, we had a driving-under-the-influence-prevention training. At 1700, we had a suicide-and-self-harm-prevention training. “Look like you’re doing something,” I instructed the platoon before heading to the bodega for milk. “Like what?” Specialist Chen asked. “Training.” When I got back, they were working on Harvey, our Human Patient Simulator, a computerized mannequin that had a heartbeat, blinked, and breathed. One of the new privates, an outdoorsy type from Long Island, was struggling to perform a needle-chest decompression. At last, Harvey’s torso ceased to inflate. The private tried to make light. No one laughed. Instead, Sergeant Pavone articulated the elbow hinge and pressed two fingers to Harvey’s wrist, feeling for whatever widget was supposed to throb. Karen had aced the civil-service exam, securing a spot at the police academy. Now, whenever we entered a crime scene, she sized up the place, noting suspicious blood trails, signs of struggle. One day, law enforcement received complaints of a man head-butting concrete walls in an alley. When Karen and I got there, we found an emotionally disturbed person keeping two officers at bay with sharp, deft karate kicks. He was well turned out for an E.D.P. He wore a tasteful suit, an understated tie, polished wingtips; every time he brandished a foot at one of the cops his pant leg hiked up, exposing colorful striped socks. The only sign of emotional disturbance was a purple hematoma from his hairline to his eyebrows. “What do we got?” Karen asked, employing one of her new favorite “Law & Order” lines. “Guy versus wall.” Karen nodded. She was still nodding when the E.D.P., with remarkable athleticism, feinted right, rolled left, and sprinted by us, up the alley. We got the next call twenty minutes later. The cops had pursued the man into a residential neighborhood, where he’d bounded through the unlocked door of a brick-and-vinyl-sided duplex. Seemed he’d made for the kitchen, extracted a chef’s knife from a heap of dirty dishes in the sink, and slit his throat. By the time we arrived, so much blood had pooled on the linoleum that I could see my dark reflection peering up at me, Karen’s peering up at her. The E.D.P. had very nearly decapitated himself, transecting both jugulars and the trachea. The cops were crouching on either side of him, pressing red dishrags to his neck. Their sleeves were sopping. They looked relieved to see us. I kneeled above the man’s head, intubated him straight through the laceration in his windpipe, connected a bag-valve to the tube, and told one of the cops to squeeze it each time he took a breath himself. By then, Karen was ready with the dressings; when we tipped the man onto his side, however, a bucket’s worth of blood dumped out. I mean enough blood to make a splash. It looked like we’d exsanguinated a pig or two. I glanced up, searching for a towel, or a fire hose, I guess, and then I saw them: a young man and woman sitting in the dining room. The dining room met the kitchen via a wide, arched doorway, and the doorway neatly framed the couple, who sat across from each other at a square table. In front of each was a wineglass with ice water, and a plate of greens. Beige napkins lay across their laps. A cube-shaped candle glowed on a ceramic plate. I noticed now the pleasant sound of jazz piano issuing from a stereo. Both the man and the woman held rigid attitudes of astonishment. The woman had brought her hand to her mouth; the man had turned slightly in his chair. It was as if, by running into their house, grabbing their knife, and murdering himself, the E.D.P. had bewitched the couple. I felt pity and a kind of kinship. That might as well have been me in there, transfixed; it might as well have been my wife. The look on their faces. It made me want to warn them. A few evenings later, at a bar on Third Avenue, First Sergeant Diaz said, “By the way, did you mail a biohazard bag full of lung butter to the P.O. box for the September 11th Victim Compensation Fund?” “What kind of a question is that?” I demanded. Diaz sipped his beer. He waved. “Never trusted that outfit. Follow the money, right?” Not long afterward, the supervisor accosted Karen and me in the garage. “Either of you two take a snow globe from that house on Waring Ave.?” he asked. Karen said nothing. “A what?” I said. “A snow globe.” “A snow globe?” “Homeowners claim it’s missing.” “Guy practically cuts his head off in their kitchen, they’re worried about a snow globe?” The supervisor shrugged, checked his watch. “I said I’d ask; I’ve asked.” He walked away. “Believe that?” I said. Karen was gazing at me sadly. “You need help, Papadopoulos,” she said. “I say that as your friend, your partner, and as a future law-enforcement officer.” I barely heard her. It was Wednesday—I was thinking about Mrs. Olenski, her cookies. Olenski, however, didn’t call. She didn’t call the next Wednesday, either, or the one after that. Finally, I suggested we stop by, and Karen, her investigative instincts eclipsing her dislike, allowed, “Something doesn’t smell right.” Prescient words. The stench reached into the hall. The TV was on. Through the walls, we could hear Rod Roddy inviting someone to come on down. Fire joined us. Police. When they jimmied the door, we found Mrs. Olenski rotting on the couch, remote control in her translucent hand. While Karen chatted with the cops, musing on the possibility of foul play, I wandered down the hall, into the bedroom. The bed was elaborately made; against the headboard, lace pillows were stacked in order of descending size, from enormous to tiny. By the window, a long-handled shoehorn leaned against a wicker chair, and several pairs of what must have been Mr. Olenski’s shoes, thick-soled loafers and white orthopedic sneakers, warmed near an electric heater. I went to the bureau and opened the drawers. I peeked in the bathroom. I checked the closet. Karen was calling. “Just a minute!” I shouted. What was I looking for? I was about to leave when I noticed, there on the nightstand, the dentures soaking in a glass of water. Next drill weekend, Finkbiner was on the warpath. Seemed somebody had stolen his mandible. I corralled the platoon in the medical-supply closet and shut the door. “Get comfortable,” I told them. We sat on ammo boxes, cots, and totes, dozing and eating the everything bagels Specialist Chen had brought. At some point, the private from Long Island, the one who’d let Harvey die, asked Sergeant Pavone, “What’s the worst, craziest, most fucked-up thing you ever saw?” And Sergeant Pavone (whose two best friends had been crossing a bridge when an R.P.G. engulfed their Humvee in flames and knocked it into the river—who, after learning that their skin had been charred and their lungs filled with water, had asked me, over and over, with a kind of awe, “Burned and drowned?”) said, “Your mother’s box.” I lay down on the floor and fell asleep. When I woke, it was to laughter. The private from Long Island had something in his hand. A set of teeth. The private was clacking them. When I sat up, the private aimed the teeth at me, clacked them, and barked. I must not have looked amused. The laughter stopped; Pavone cleared his throat. “Are they yours, Sergeant?” the private asked. I lay back down. I went back to sleep. My time at the armory was coming to an end. After the jawbone disappeared, Finkbiner bought a surveillance camera. He informed Diaz, who informed me, that it would be installed the following week. The house where my wife lived, where we had lived together, was in Flushing, only two trains and a short bus ride away. I found Elijah, our neighbor, exactly as I’d left him: shoulder-deep in the engine of his Chevy, defiantly exhibiting his bottom. When he saw me, he straightened. “Back from the dead,” he said, dragging two black palm prints across his tank top. I waved and kept moving. When I got to our door, I was surprised to find it padlocked with a heavy steel latch. I lifted the mail slot and peered inside. Another surprise. All the furniture was gone, the living room completely empty. A few packing peanuts were scattered on the floor, like critter droppings. Elijah was out on the sidewalk, a wrench in his hand, watching me. I walked back to him. “Where’d she go?” I said. “Arizona. Nevada. Someplace like that.” “Why?” “Mike had another opportunity, a fellowship or grant or something.” Elijah tapped his brow with the wrench. “Sharp, that Mike. A genius, if you ask me.” “Who’s Mike?” I said. “You know,” Elijah said. “Mike.” I thought about that. “When’d they leave?” “Four, five months ago?” Elijah cocked his head and squinted at me. “So, what, you get sent over there again? I thought we were done with all that.” “We are,” I said. Elijah nodded. “About time,” he said. Then he frowned in a serious way and extended his greasy hand. I took it. “Welcome home,” Elijah said. It was Karen’s last month on the bus, her last month as a paramedic. No, I was not happy for her. Every chance I got, I cut her leathers. “Did I ever tell you about Corporal Nevins?” I said. Corporal Nevins, like me, had joined the National Guard when it was still the National Guard: adult Boy Scouts, money for college, a reprieve from the city one weekend a month. On the last day of our last deployment, he was in the turret of an MRAP, climbing a small hill to bid farewell to the Afghan Army soldiers who manned the outpost on top. A high-voltage, low-hanging electrical wire caught Nevins right between his flak and his Kevlar, right where it could kill him. “Just saying,” I told Karen. She smiled. You couldn’t nick her with a chain saw. “I’ve heard that one,” she said. “Only he wasn’t a corporal. And his name wasn’t Nevins. And there were no Afghan soldiers. And it wasn’t a wire.” A few days before her final shift, they sent us to the projects. I recognized the building and the apartment number instantly. It was the small man: that fucking shithead, Marty. Once again, the boy in the hoodie met us outside the lobby, and once again the obese woman wearily led us to the bedroom. She wore the same bathrobe as before, and the same nightgown—but her sweatsuit, this time, was purplish, not brownish. Little else had changed. The action on the TV continued; the children glowed on. As I injected the man with yet another bolus of naloxone, I looked at the boy in the hoodie. He chewed his gum, blew his bubbles, and said nothing. En route to the hospital, I sat beside the man, monitoring his vitals. “Why’d you do that?” he kept asking. “Why’d you have to go and do that?” After we delivered him, I changed the sheets on the stretcher and got a fresh backboard from the locker in the ambulance bay. I took out my wallet. I felt the note. I rubbed the paper between my thumb and finger. I brought the paper out. I smelled it. I unfolded it. I was just about to read it—I don’t know, I wanted to read it—when Karen, wild-eyed, hopped down from the back of the bus. “Where’s the drug box?” she said. Not until we were racing back to Ridgedale did the full magnitude of my blunder begin to impress itself on me. There were enough narcotics in that box to put a family down. There were nerve agents, paralytic agents, anti-arrhythmic agents. There were vials of pure adrenaline, sedatives, steroids, Valium, and anesthetics. “That boy,” I said. “I was distracted.” Karen switched on the lights and the siren. She clenched her teeth. It looked like a mini tachycardic heart was pounding in her cheek. “My last month,” she said. When we got there, Karen stayed in the bus while I ran inside. The sweat-suited woman crossed her arms and clucked while I searched the bedroom. “You people,” she commented. The box wasn’t there. When I asked her where her son was, the woman scowled and reared back, as if from a bee. Karen was waiting in the lobby. “I’m calling it in,” she said. “Nobody’s calling anybody,” I said. I walked outside. The light was dimming, and the lamps, in anticipation, were on. I followed a footpath, distended by shallow tree roots, around the corner. In the lamp-and-evening light I saw a small playground: a metal climbing structure and a swing set anchored to a concrete pad. A group of teen-agers were gathered by the swings. They were huddled close together, convening over something. I approached with caution. Before I got very near, one of them noticed me and alerted the others. There was some jostling—some hurried consultation—and then, all at once, they scattered. I saw, I thought I saw, a boy carrying something under his arm. I pursued him. We ran through the warren of brick apartment buildings, past more playgrounds, across a basketball court, across a parking lot, down a street, and then back into the warren, back to the first playground, it seemed, though maybe not. I had lost sight of him. I leaned against a lamppost and hacked up beautiful black samples. In the distance, a dark figure flitted by the window of a lobby. I jogged there. Beside the elevator, a door led to a stairwell; when I opened it, I heard footsteps and followed them up the stairs. I was so tired. I kept having to pause, slump against the wall, cough. At some point, I realized that the footsteps had stopped. I opened a door, looked both ways down a hall. It was empty. I did the same on the next floor, and the next. Empty, empty. I reached the top. “Alarm Will Sound,” the sign said. I pushed and nothing happened. I was on the roof. It was dark out. It was not evening anymore. How long had I been chasing the boy? I looked at my watch. Our shift was already over—it had been over for some time. I walked to the edge of the roof. Far away, on the opposite side of the projects, I saw the blue-and-red lights of squad cars, the white beams of flashlights sweeping bushes and dumpsters. Beyond that was the river, a slick of oil in a phosphorescent sea. And beyond that? Somewhere someone was calling my name.

The red-haired homeless lady was arrested after she fell in the street and a taxi almost ran over her. Just before her mad dash into traffic (who could account for her actions?), she’d accused a black dog on a leash of being the Devil, an assertion that had been strenuously objected to by the dog’s owner. The dog’s name was Major Maybe, and his story was better known in our neighborhood than the red-haired lady’s. The breeder had named the dog Major, and the family that adopted him—our next-door neighbors, the Leavells—tried to call him something similar in order to avoid confusing him. They’d tried Mark and Mason, but the dog would not respond to any name beginning with “M” until the family’s four-year-old daughter, who talked to her dolls a lot—telling them that maybe they would go to Barneys and maybe they would go to the park and maybe they would get a cookie if they were good. . . . As you must have guessed, little Corey Leavell came up with the only new name the dog would accept. Later, it was thought funny to call him Major Maybe. My roommate during this time was an acting student named Eagle Soars. His father, who was English, had married an American, who claimed that her great-grandmother had had Indian blood. Eagle Soars had been Eddie in school, but his birth certificate really did give his first and middle names as Eagle Soars (his last name, which he later dropped, was Stevens), and by the time he was twenty it had occurred to him that the name might be useful if he intended to act. He made extra money by giving Major Maybe his 4 p.m. walk over to Tenth Avenue, then across either Twenty-first or Twenty-second Street, down Eighth Avenue, and back along Twentieth to home. In those days, Chelsea was more of a mom-and-pop neighborhood. No art galleries, just a few sex clubs way west. There was a nice florist called Howe. I sometimes bought a single flower to take back to the apartment and add to my little altar on the far-left side of the deep windows that overlooked the back yard, which already included a picture of my mother and father on their wedding day, in a little heart-shaped frame; a photograph of my sister lying on a fur rug, looking dazed, the day they brought her back from the hospital; a badly faded snapshot of my first pet, Doris the cat; inside a Plexiglas box, the dried-up wrist corsage I’d worn to my senior prom; and one of my wisdom teeth, which dangled from a chain around the casement-window handle. I had grouped these things together in solidarity with Eagle Soars, whose own display, on the right-hand side of the windowsill, featured a double photo frame holding both his high-school graduation picture and a snapshot of the boy he had a crush on in high school, with a big bandage across his face after reconstructive surgery on his nose (bicycle accident); a pencil sharpener with a tutu-skirted hippopotamus in second position; a teaspoon stolen from the Plaza; and a framed eviction notice from his previous landlord in Columbus, Ohio. It was an ongoing joke that whenever I had a new flower he’d move it to the right in the middle of the night, and when he was out walking Major Maybe I’d put it back on my side. We split the weekly wine bill, because neither of us drank more than the other. He was more interested in weed, and I was interested in not getting fat. Still, we went through a gallon a week of an Italian white that the wine seller always said he wouldn’t have access to for long (though nothing would have made us spend our money on a whole case of wine). I was working part time as a waitress, and my mother sent a check every month to cover half my rent. On the day of the incident with the dog and the red-haired lady, Soars and I were out on the little chairs that sat inside the iron fence in front of the brownstone, where a large pink potted hibiscus set out by the guy in the basement apartment added a huge amount of atmosphere. Also, he’d put circular cushions on the chairs, which made them so much easier to sit on. He was a psychologist who specialized in adolescents. They’d arrive and depart with deep scowls, throwing down cigarettes and crushing them, rarely making eye contact with us. The psychologist had told us that it was better not to greet his clients, because there was hardly anything we could say to them that would be correct. We accepted this and ignored their acne eruptions and fanned away their cigarette smoke and basically looked right through them, unless they seemed so desperate to be friendly that we said the word “hello.” Once, an ambulance came to get one of the clients from the basement, who, we later found out (in spite of doctor-patient confidentiality), had been bleeding and had stuffed washcloths in his pants to come to his weekly appointment. The basement was called the “garden apartment.” When the wisteria was in bloom, the psychologist took back his little chairs and added them to others in the yard behind the house and had a real champagne party, to which we were always invited. If he ever sat in the chairs when they were out front, we never saw it. Then again, we were in them a lot, and he was a pleasant, polite man, so maybe he didn’t have much of a chance. We were doing acting exercises. Soars read his lines, and at some point it was my job to interject something distracting, or to go into a fake coughing spasm, or even to say something hostile, such as “You miserable faggot, you’re no Edward, let alone Lear!” The thought was that anything could happen during a performance, and the actor had to squelch his real-life reaction and keep going without faltering. Soars had only one copy of the script, since it cost money to xerox, so we sat close together. I tried to act, too, to the extent that I didn’t want him to be able to anticipate one of my sneezes or outbursts, which I’d learned he could sense by the way my breathing altered slightly when I was about to speak, or by my moving even the tiniest bit, or by the almost inaudible sound my lips made when parting. My job was to zing him without warning. One time I actually threw myself off my chair and writhed like someone having a seizure. I’d deliberately worn long sleeves and jeans, so the damage was minor, but a delivery person wheeling seltzer bottles into the brownstone next door stopped and ran to my assistance, and it was more than a little embarrassing when we had to explain. I’m so sentimental. I can hardly believe there was ever such a time. (I’m a doctor now, with a medical group in Portland, Maine; Soars is the divorced father of twins and an avid white-water rafter, who leads trips for a tour company out West, writes articles about the outdoors, and teaches at a community college.) “I don’t do spells. I’m a wizard at deciphering rap lyrics.”Buy the print » Here’s an obvious thing that I didn’t think about until recently: Soars and I weren’t just well suited to living together. We were so simpatico we morphed into an old married couple, in speeded-up time. For years, we were playacting the daily routines of marriage, with my sudden, sometimes insane eruptions of temper, our long-standing joke about moving each other’s tchotchkes, our constantly repeated lines (though his, ideally, came from Shakespeare). While Soars was still in New York, he decided that, except for the big crush he’d had on his high-school friend, he wasn’t gay. He stopped dating men and began to hang out with me and my girlfriends, and then he began dating one of them, whose heart he later broke, but that’s another story; even if he was bi, he chose to marry women. Anyway, as Soars and I were rehearsing that day, the red-haired lady stood up from where she’d been sitting on the sidewalk and cursed our dog friend, screaming, “Lucifer the Devil! Lu-u-u-u-u-u-ucifer!” and then rushing poor, scared Major Maybe, who’d just lifted a leg to pee against his favorite tree and was humiliated when he had to drop it midstream. She stretched out her arms, meaning perhaps to topple Mr. Leavell, who simply turned sideways and let the wild tornado pass. (Major Maybe, a peaceful fellow, had flattened himself on the ground.) And so she did, twirling crazily from her little bare feet up her thick legs, her long, stained skirt tangling in a way that tripped her, so that when she continued her trajectory between parked cars, into Twentieth Street, howling that once the Devil had appeared there could be no redemption, the fabric coiled around her like cotton candy, and she was flung forward, as if someone really had not enjoyed the treat. A cab screeched to a halt, and the driver jumped out and bent over her like a referee giving the count, his finger scolding; woman down . . . until up she sprang, wrapping her arms around him and trying to squeeze him to death, as a passing seminarian and Mr. Leavell (who was in his fifties) converged and tried to pull her off. Major Maybe was so mortified that his jaw went flaccid, his leash having been tossed over one of the pointy spikes of the iron gate that enclosed the little cement area in front of his home. The leash was too short for him to lie down without being strangled, so he had to sit and watch the spectacle. He’d had an invigorating walk, lifted his leg for a few pees, and experienced some excellent sniffs, and now this: an explosion from a street person sent our way by Fidel Castro, who’d released Cubans from mental hospitals and put them on ships and sent them here to mingle with our own crazy people. On good days, the red-haired lady sang hymns in Spanish, in a beautiful, clear soprano. She felt the breeze blow through her hair. She ate her saltines and did nothing to anyone. On bad days . . . well. Where were the police? Where were the police? This was a time before cell phones. When the police arrived, they handled the red-haired lady roughly, so much so that the seminarian took issue. (It did no good.) Her wrists were cuffed and a policeman dunked her head into the police car like a basketball player sinking a one-handed shot. Easy. Nothing to it. Fast resumption of the game. Our rehearsal was suspended. Mr. Leavell picked up the dog’s leash and marched up the steps into his house. Soars and I went upstairs and broke out the bottle of Italian white and sat in our director’s chairs for a while—they were cheap, and practically the only furniture we had. I didn’t worry about Soars stealing my flower to his side. It was a rubrum lily that day, dropping its pollen onto the floor beneath the window, a giant’s yellow dandruff. Outside, the wisteria vine was thick and green, curlicues and pointing pale-green shoots, like witch’s fingers, that would continue to quickly unfurl, though it was no longer in bloom. We took a walk. We discussed our futures. We wondered if we were going to fail, just simply fail: if he’d ever get a decent role, if I’d ever figure out what I wanted to do in life. We wondered if AIDS would sweep through the city, if the red-haired lady was sane enough to be scared at the police station, how long Major Maybe would live. Soars reached for my hand. We never held hands, because, of course, we weren’t a couple. We laced our fingers, and I was astonished at how bony his hand felt. His palm was sweaty. Then we did what so many people do on someone else’s wedding day, or after someone else’s funeral, though in this case it was on the day that some street person got carted off to the police station. We went back to our apartment and fucked. We had a good time doing it, but the only thing that changed afterward was that, for some reason, neither of us continued to play the game of Steal the Flower. I soon stopped buying them. I used the money to buy other little luxuries, like mascara. Soars went on dating my friend. I met the man I married at a wedding I attended in Cape Neddick, Maine, that December (the bridesmaids carried white rabbit-fur muffs), though it took us eight years to get around to marrying. First, I wasn’t sure about leaving New York City. Then I decided on medical school, but I wasn’t accepted at any school in New York, so the decision about leaving was made for me. If you were in New York in the eighties, you wonder now where everybody went, and then you remind yourself that quite a few of the people who made up the neighborhood owned their property and dug in their heels, and eventually died. Some died of AIDS. Some moved to Brooklyn. Or to the West, or to Atlanta. After 9/11, quite a lot of young people made an exodus from New York City to Portland, Maine, where the big waterfront buildings were already being turned into artists’ studios and condos with ground-floor boutiques. Cool Portland, with its summertime tourists boarding boats and hoping to see seals as they cruise out to one of the islands. Back on land, the time-warp hippies cross paths with people who live in brownstones and don’t have to think about money. There’s street art, and folding chairs are set up in music clubs. Used-book stores are still in business. If you’re a certain age, Portland more or less exists in ironic quotation marks (though, of course, no hipster would dare scratch them in the air). Recently, on Airbnb, I saw my old apartment. There was even a picture taken out the window, someone having pulled down enough of the wisteria vine to allow a view. A kitchen had been created out of part of the hallway and what used to be the coat closet. It looked as though the floor had been painted black, with an Oriental rug placed on it. The photographs were taken with a fish-eye lens. It was a small apartment, under the pitch of the roof, so that you couldn’t even stand up in parts of the bedroom. But it’s all deception, right? You understand that the picture shows more space than actually exists. You fall for the vase of fresh flowers on the nightstand that in real life probably has the circumference of a pie pan. A whole vase of flowers in the photograph. So lavish, its extravagance conveying more than a sense of romance or the idea of a luxurious life inside a welcoming apartment. Flowers that would be whisked away after the shot, as the curtains were pulled together to block the daylight that would fade the rug. Close down the set, bring on the travellers, light it up again. Indelible, the yellow pollen on the floor.

Twice a month, like a dutiful son, I visited my parents in Enugu, in their small overfurnished flat that grew dark in the afternoon. Retirement had changed them, shrunk them. They were in their late eighties, both small and mahogany-skinned, with a tendency to stoop. They seemed to look more and more alike, as though all the years together had made their features blend and bleed into one another. They even smelled alike—a menthol scent, from the green vial of Vicks VapoRub they passed to each other, carefully rubbing a little in their nostrils and on aching joints. When I arrived, I would find them either sitting out on the veranda overlooking the road or sunk into the living-room sofa, watching Animal Planet. They had a new, simple sense of wonder. They marvelled at the wiliness of wolves, laughed at the cleverness of apes, and asked each other, “Ifukwa? Did you see that?” They had, too, a new, baffling patience for incredible stories. Once, my mother told me that a sick neighbor in Abba, our ancestral home town, had vomited a grasshopper—a living, writhing insect, which, she said, was proof that wicked relatives had poisoned him. “Somebody texted us a picture of the grasshopper,” my father said. They always supported each other’s stories. When my father told me that Chief Okeke’s young house help had mysteriously died, and the story around town was that the chief had killed the teen-ager and used her liver for moneymaking rituals, my mother added, “They say he used the heart, too.” Fifteen years earlier, my parents would have scoffed at these stories. My mother, a professor of political science, would have said “Nonsense” in her crisp manner, and my father, a professor of education, would merely have snorted, the stories not worth the effort of speech. It puzzled me that they had shed those old selves, and become the kind of Nigerians who told anecdotes about diabetes cured by drinking holy water. Still, I humored them and half listened to their stories. It was a kind of innocence, this new childhood of old age. They had grown slower with the passing years, and their faces lit up at the sight of me and even their prying questions—“When will you give us a grandchild? When will you bring a girl to introduce to us?”—no longer made me as tense as before. Each time I drove away, on Sunday afternoons after a big lunch of rice and stew, I wondered if it would be the last time I would see them both alive, if before my next visit I would receive a phone call from one of them telling me to come right away. The thought filled me with a nostalgic sadness that stayed with me until I got back to Port Harcourt. And yet I knew that if I had a family, if I could complain about rising school fees as the children of their friends did, then I would not visit them so regularly. I would have nothing for which to make amends. During a visit in November, my parents talked about the increase in armed robberies all over the east. Thieves, too, had to prepare for Christmas. My mother told me how a vigilante mob in Onitsha had caught some thieves, beaten them, and torn off their clothes—how old tires had been thrown over their heads like necklaces, amid shouts for petrol and matches, before the police arrived, fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd, and took the robbers away. My mother paused, and I waited for a supernatural detail that would embellish the story. Perhaps, just as they arrived at the police station, the thieves had turned into vultures and flown away. “Do you know,” she continued, “one of the armed robbers, in fact the ring leader, was Raphael? He was our houseboy years ago. I don’t think you’ll remember him.” I stared at my mother. “Raphael?” “It’s not surprising he ended like this,” my father said. “He didn’t start well.” My mind had been submerged in the foggy lull of my parents’ storytelling, and I struggled now with the sharp awakening of memory. My mother said again, “You probably won’t remember him. There were so many of those houseboys. You were young.” But I remembered. Of course I remembered Raphael. Nothing changed when Raphael came to live with us, not at first. He seemed like all the others, an ordinary-looking teen from a nearby village. The houseboy before him, Hyginus, had been sent home for insulting my mother. Before Hyginus was John, whom I remembered because he had not been sent away; he had broken a plate while washing it and, fearing my mother’s anger, had packed his things and fled before she came home from work. All the houseboys treated me with the contemptuous care of people who disliked my mother. Please come and eat your food, they would say—I don’t want trouble from Madam. My mother regularly shouted at them, for being slow, stupid, hard of hearing; even her bell-ringing, her thumb resting on the red knob, the shrillness searing through the house, sounded like shouting. How difficult could it be to remember to fry the eggs differently, my father’s plain and hers with onions, or to put the Russian dolls back on the same shelf after dusting, or to iron my school uniform properly? I was my parents’ only child, born late in their lives. “When I got pregnant, I thought it was menopause,” my mother told me once. I must have been around eight years old, and did not know what “menopause” meant. She had a brusque manner, as did my father; they had about them the air of people who were quick to dismiss others. They had met at the University of Ibadan, married against their families’ wishes—his thought her too educated, while hers preferred a wealthier suitor—and spent their lives in an intense and intimate competition over who published more, who won at badminton, who had the last word in an argument. They often read aloud to each other in the evening, from journals or newspapers, standing rather than sitting in the parlor, sometimes pacing, as though about to spring at a new idea. They drank Mateus rosé—that dark, shapely bottle always seemed to be resting on a table near them—and left behind glasses faint with reddish dregs. Throughout my childhood, I worried about not being quick enough to respond when they spoke to me. I worried, too, that I did not care for books. Reading did not do to me what it did to my parents, agitating them or turning them into vague beings lost to time, who did not quite notice when I came and went. I read books only enough to satisfy them, and to answer the kinds of unexpected questions that might come in the middle of a meal—What did I think of Pip? Had Ezeulu done the right thing? I sometimes felt like an interloper in our house. My bedroom had bookshelves, stacked with the overflow books that did not fit in the study and the corridor, and they made my stay feel transient, as though I were not quite where I was supposed to be. I sensed my parents’ disappointment in the way they glanced at each other when I spoke about a book, and I knew that what I had said was not incorrect but merely ordinary, uncharged with their brand of originality. Going to the staff club with them was an ordeal: I found badminton boring, the shuttlecock seemed to me an unfinished thing, as though whoever had invented the game had stopped halfway. “Oh, there’s your problem—twenty years of resentment at having to do the dishes.”Buy the print » What I loved was kung fu. I watched “Enter the Dragon” so often that I knew all the lines, and I longed to wake up and be Bruce Lee. I would kick and strike at the air, at imaginary enemies who had killed my imaginary family. I would pull my mattress onto the floor, stand on two thick books—usually hardcover copies of “Black Beauty” and “The Water-Babies”—and leap onto the mattress, screaming “Haaa!” like Bruce Lee. One day, in the middle of my practice, I looked up to see Raphael standing in the doorway, watching me. I expected a mild reprimand. He had made my bed that morning, and now the room was in disarray. Instead, he smiled, touched his chest, and brought his finger to his tongue, as though tasting his own blood. My favorite scene. I stared at Raphael with the pure thrill of unexpected pleasure. “I watched the film in the other house where I worked,” he said. “Look at this.” He pivoted slightly, leaped up, and kicked, his leg straight and high, his body all taut grace. I was twelve years old and had, until then, never felt that I recognized myself in another person. Raphael and I practiced in the back yard, leaping from the raised concrete soakaway and landing on the grass. Raphael told me to suck in my belly, to keep my legs straight and my fingers precise. He taught me to breathe. My previous attempts, in the enclosure of my room, had felt stillborn. Now, outside with Raphael, slicing the air with my arms, I could feel my practice become real, with soft grass below and high sky above, and the endless space mine to conquer. This was truly happening. I could become a black belt one day. Outside the kitchen door was a high open veranda, and I wanted to jump off its flight of six steps and try a flying kick. “No,” Raphael said. “That veranda is too high.” On weekends, if my parents went to the staff club without me, Raphael and I watched Bruce Lee videotapes, Raphael saying, “Watch it! Watch it!” Through his eyes, I saw the films anew; some moves that I had thought merely competent became luminous when he said, “Watch it!” Raphael knew what really mattered; his wisdom lay easy on his skin. He rewound the sections in which Bruce Lee used a nunchaku, and watched unblinking, gasping at the clean aggression of the metal-and-wood weapon. “I wish I had a nunchaku,” I said. “It is very difficult to use,” Raphael said firmly, and I felt almost sorry to have wanted one. Not long afterward, I came back from school one day and Raphael said, “See.” From the cupboard he took out a nunchaku—two pieces of wood, cut from an old cleaning mop and sanded down, held together by a spiral of metal springs. He must have been making it for at least a week, in his free time after his housework. He showed me how to use it. His moves seemed clumsy, nothing like Bruce Lee’s. I took the nunchaku and tried to swing it, but only ended up with a thump on my chest. Raphael laughed. “You think you can just start like that?” he said. “You have to practice for a long time.” At school, I sat through classes thinking of the wood’s smoothness in the palm of my hand. It was after school, with Raphael, that my real life began. My parents did not notice how close Raphael and I had become. All they saw was that I now happened to play outside, and Raphael was, of course, part of the landscape of outside: weeding the garden, washing pots at the water tank. One afternoon, Raphael finished plucking a chicken and interrupted my solo practice on the lawn. “Fight!” he said. A duel began, his hands bare, mine swinging my new weapon. He pushed me hard. One end hit him on the arm, and he looked surprised and then impressed, as if he had not thought me capable. I swung again and again. He feinted and dodged and kicked. Time collapsed. In the end, we were both panting and laughing. I remember, even now, very clearly, the smallness of his shorts that afternoon, and how the muscles ran wiry like ropes down his legs. On weekends, I ate lunch with my parents. I always ate quickly, dreaming of escape and hoping that they would not turn to me with one of their test questions. At one lunch, Raphael served white disks of boiled yam on a bed of greens, and then cubed pawpaw and pineapple. “The vegetable was too tough,” my mother said. “Are we grass-eating goats?” She glanced at him. “What is wrong with your eyes?” It took me a moment to realize that this was not her usual figurative lambasting—“What is that big object blocking your nose?” she would ask, if she noticed a smell in the kitchen that he had not. The whites of Raphael’s eyes were red. A painful, unnatural red. He mumbled that an insect had flown into them. “It looks like Apollo,” my father said. My mother pushed back her chair and examined Raphael’s face. “Ah-ah! Yes, it is. Go to your room and stay there.” Raphael hesitated, as though wanting to finish clearing the plates. “Go!” my father said. “Before you infect us all with this thing.” Raphael, looking confused, edged away from the table. My mother called him back. “Have you had this before?” “No, Madam.” “It’s an infection of your conjunctiva, the thing that covers your eyes,” she said. In the midst of her Igbo words, “conjunctiva” sounded sharp and dangerous. “We’re going to buy medicine for you. Use it three times a day and stay in your room. Don’t cook until it clears.” Turning to me, she said, “Okenwa, make sure you don’t go near him. Apollo is very infectious.” From her perfunctory tone, it was clear that she did not imagine I would have any reason to go near Raphael. Later, my parents drove to the pharmacy in town and came back with a bottle of eye drops, which my father took to Raphael’s room in the boys’ quarters, at the back of the house, with the air of someone going reluctantly into battle. That evening, I went with my parents to Obollo Road to buy akara for dinner; when we returned, it felt strange not to have Raphael open the front door, not to find him closing the living-room curtains and turning on the lights. In the quiet kitchen, our house seemed emptied of life. As soon as my parents were immersed in themselves, I went out to the boys’ quarters and knocked on Raphael’s door. It was ajar. He was lying on his back, his narrow bed pushed against the wall, and turned when I came in, surprised, making as if to get up. I had never been in his room before. The exposed light bulb dangling from the ceiling cast sombre shadows. “What is it?” he asked. “Nothing. I came to see how you are.” He shrugged and settled back down on the bed. “I don’t know how I got this. Don’t come close.” But I went close. “I had Apollo in Primary 3,” I said. “It will go quickly, don’t worry. Have you used the eye drops this evening?” He shrugged and said nothing. The bottle of eye drops sat unopened on the table. “You haven’t used them at all?” I asked. “No.” “Why?” He avoided looking at me. “I cannot do it.” Raphael, who could disembowel a turkey and lift a full bag of rice, could not drip liquid medicine into his eyes. At first, I was astonished, then amused, and then moved. I looked around his room and was struck by how bare it was—the bed pushed against the wall, a spindly table, a gray metal box in the corner, which I assumed contained all that he owned. “I will put the drops in for you,” I said. I took the bottle and twisted off the cap. “Don’t come close,” he said again. I was already close. I bent over him. He began a frantic blinking. “Breathe like in kung fu,” I said. I touched his face, gently pulled down his lower left eyelid, and dropped the liquid into his eye. The other lid I pulled more firmly, because he had shut his eyes tight. “Ndo,” I said. “Sorry.” He opened his eyes and looked at me, and on his face shone something wondrous. I had never felt myself the subject of admiration. It made me think of science class, of a new maize shoot growing greenly toward light. He touched my arm. I turned to go. “I’ll come before I go to school,” I said. In the morning, I slipped into his room, put in his eye drops, and slipped out and into my father’s car, to be dropped off at school. “My greatest asset is my ability to tell you exactly what you want to hear.”Buy the print » By the third day, Raphael’s room felt familiar to me, welcoming, uncluttered by objects. As I put in the drops, I discovered things about him that I guarded closely: the early darkening of hair above his upper lip, the ringworm patch in the hollow between his jaw and his neck. I sat on the edge of his bed and we talked about “Snake in the Monkey’s Shadow.” We had discussed the film many times, and we said things that we had said before, but in the quiet of his room they felt like secrets. Our voices were low, almost hushed. His body’s warmth cast warmth over me. He got up to demonstrate the snake style, and afterward, both of us laughing, he grasped my hand in his. Then he let go and moved slightly away from me. “This Apollo has gone,” he said. His eyes were clear. I wished he had not healed so quickly. I dreamed of being with Raphael and Bruce Lee in an open field, practicing for a fight. When I woke up, my eyes refused to open. I pried my lids apart. My eyes burned and itched. Each time I blinked, they seemed to produce more pale ugly fluid that coated my lashes. It felt as if heated grains of sand were under my eyelids. I feared that something inside me was thawing that was not supposed to thaw. My mother shouted at Raphael, “Why did you bring this thing to my house? Why?” It was as though by catching Apollo he had conspired to infect her son. Raphael did not respond. He never did when she shouted at him. She was standing at the top of the stairs, and Raphael was below her. “How did he manage to give you Apollo from his room?” my father asked me. “It wasn’t Raphael. I think I got it from somebody in my class,” I told my parents. “Who?” I should have known my mother would ask. At that moment, my mind erased all my classmates’ names. “Who?” she asked again. “Chidi Obi,” I said finally, the first name that came to me. He sat in front of me and smelled like old clothes. “Do you have a headache?” my mother asked. “Yes.” My father brought me Panadol. My mother telephoned Dr. Igbokwe. My parents were brisk. They stood by my door, watching me drink a cup of Milo that my father had made. I drank quickly. I hoped that they would not drag an armchair into my room, as they did every time I was sick with malaria, when I would wake up with a bitter tongue to find one parent inches from me, silently reading a book, and I would will myself to get well quickly, to free them. Dr. Igbokwe arrived and shined a torch in my eyes. His cologne was strong; I could smell it long after he’d gone, a heady scent close to alcohol that I imagined would worsen nausea. After he left, my parents created a patient’s altar by my bed—on a table covered with cloth, they put a bottle of orange Lucozade, a blue tin of glucose, and freshly peeled oranges on a plastic tray. They did not bring the armchair, but one of them was home throughout the week that I had Apollo. They took turns putting in my eye drops, my father more clumsily than my mother, leaving sticky liquid running down my face. They did not know how well I could put in the drops myself. Each time they raised the bottle above my face, I remembered the look in Raphael’s eyes that first evening in his room, and I felt haunted by happiness. My parents closed the curtains and kept my room dark. I was sick of lying down. I wanted to see Raphael, but my mother had banned him from my room, as though he could somehow make my condition worse. I wished that he would come and see me. Surely he could pretend to be putting away a bedsheet, or bringing a bucket to the bathroom. Why didn’t he come? He had not even said sorry to me. I strained to hear his voice, but the kitchen was too far away and his voice, when he spoke to my mother, was too low. Once, after going to the toilet, I tried to sneak downstairs to the kitchen, but my father loomed at the bottom of the stairs. “Kedu?” He asked. “Are you all right?” “I want water,” I said. “I’ll bring it. Go and lie down.” Finally, my parents went out together. I had been sleeping, and woke up to sense the emptiness of the house. I hurried downstairs and to the kitchen. It, too, was empty. I wondered if Raphael was in the boys’ quarters; he was not supposed to go to his room during the day, but maybe he had, now that my parents were away. I went out to the open veranda. I heard Raphael’s voice before I saw him, standing near the tank, digging his foot into the sand, talking to Josephine, Professor Nwosu’s house help. Professor Nwosu sometimes sent eggs from his poultry, and never let my parents pay for them. Had Josephine brought eggs? She was tall and plump; now she had the air of someone who had already said goodbye but was lingering. With her, Raphael was different—the slouch in his back, the agitated foot. He was shy. She was talking to him with a kind of playful power, as though she could see through him to things that amused her. My reason blurred. “Raphael!” I called out. He turned. “Oh. Okenwa. Are you allowed to come downstairs?” He spoke as though I were a child, as though we had not sat together in his dim room. “I’m hungry! Where is my food?” It was the first thing that came to me, but in trying to be imperious I sounded shrill. Josephine’s face puckered, as though she were about to break into slow, long laughter. Raphael said something that I could not hear, but it had the sound of betrayal. My parents drove up just then, and suddenly Josephine and Raphael were roused. Josephine hurried out of the compound, and Raphael came toward me. His shirt was stained in the front, orangish, like palm oil from soup. Had my parents not come back, he would have stayed there mumbling by the tank; my presence had changed nothing. “What do you want to eat?” he asked. “You didn’t come to see me.” “You know Madam said I should not go near you.” Why was he making it all so common and ordinary? I, too, had been asked not to go to his room, and yet I had gone, I had put in his eye drops every day. “After all, you gave me the Apollo,” I said. “Sorry.” He said it dully, his mind elsewhere. I could hear my mother’s voice. I was angry that they were back. My time with Raphael was shortened, and I felt the sensation of a widening crack. “Do you want plantain or yam?” Raphael asked, not to placate me but as if nothing serious had happened. My eyes were burning again. He came up the steps. I moved away from him, too quickly, to the edge of the veranda, and my rubber slippers shifted under me. Unbalanced, I fell. I landed on my hands and knees, startled by the force of my own weight, and I felt the tears coming before I could stop them. Stiff with humiliation, I did not move. My parents appeared. “Okenwa!” my father shouted. I stayed on the ground, a stone sunk in my knee. “Raphael pushed me.” “What?” My parents said it at the same time, in English. “What?” There was time. Before my father turned to Raphael, and before my mother lunged at him as if to slap him, and before she told him to go pack his things and leave immediately, there was time. I could have spoken. I could have cut into that silence. I could have said that it was an accident. I could have taken back my lie and left my parents merely to wonder.

Musa was my older brother. His head seemed to strike the clouds. He was quite tall, yes, and his body was thin and knotty from hunger and the strength that comes from anger. He had an angular face, big hands that protected me, and hard eyes, because our ancestors had lost their land. But when I think about it I believe that he already loved us then the way the dead do, with no useless words and a look in his eyes that came from the hereafter. I have only a few pictures of him in my head, but I want to describe them to you carefully. For example, the day he came home early from the neighborhood market, or maybe from the port, where he worked as a handyman and a porter, toting, dragging, lifting, sweating. Anyway, that day he came upon me while I was playing with an old tire, and he put me on his shoulders and told me to hold on to his ears, as if his head were a steering wheel. I remember the joy I felt as he rolled the tire along and made a sound like a motor. His smell comes back to me, too, a persistent mingling of rotten vegetables, sweat, and breath. Another picture in my memory is from the day of Eid one year. Musa had given me a hiding the day before for some stupid thing I’d done, and now we were both embarrassed. It was a day of forgiveness and he was supposed to kiss me, but I didn’t want him to lose face and lower himself by apologizing to me, not even in God’s name. I also remember his gift for immobility, the way he could stand stock still on the threshold of our house, facing the neighbors’ wall, holding a cigarette and the cup of black coffee our mother brought him. Our father had disappeared long ago and existed now in fragments in the rumors we heard from people who claimed to have run into him in France. Only Musa could hear his voice. He’d give Musa commands in his dreams, and Musa would relay them to us. My brother had seen our father just once since he left, and from such a distance that he wasn’t even sure it was him. As a child, I learned how to distinguish the days with rumors from the days without. When Musa heard people talking about my father, he’d come home all feverish gestures and burning eyes, and then he and Mama would have long, whispered conversations that ended in heated arguments. I was excluded from those, but I got the gist: for some obscure reason, my brother held a grudge against Mama, and she defended herself in a way that was even more obscure. Those were unsettling days and nights, filled with anger, and I lived in fear at the idea that Musa might leave us, too. But he’d always return at dawn, drunk, oddly proud of his rebellion, seemingly endowed with renewed vigor. Then he’d sober up and fade away. All he wanted to do was sleep, and in this way my mother would get him under her control again. I have some pictures in my head—they’re all I can offer you. A cup of coffee, some cigarette butts, his espadrilles, Mama crying and then recovering quickly to smile at a neighbor who’d come to borrow some tea or spices, moving from distress to courtesy so fast that it made me doubt her sincerity, as young as I was. Everything revolved around Musa, and Musa revolved around our father, whom I never knew and who left me nothing but our family name. Do you know what we were called in those days? Uled el-assas, the sons of the guardian. Of the watchman, to be more precise. My father had worked as a night watchman in a factory where they made I don’t know what. One night, he disappeared. And that’s all. That’s the story I was told. It happened in the nineteen-thirties, right after I was born. So Musa was a god for me, a simple god of few words. His thick beard and powerful arms made him seem like a giant who could have wrung the neck of any soldier in an ancient Pharaoh’s army. Which was why, on the day we learned of his death and the circumstances surrounding it, I didn’t feel sad or angry at first; instead, I felt disappointed and offended, as if someone had insulted me. My brother was capable of parting the sea, and yet he died in insignificance, like a bit player, on a beach that is no longer there, beside the waves that should have made him famous forever. “When is it ever the right time to ask for a divorce?”Buy the print » As a child, I was allowed to hear only one story at night, only one deceptively wonderful tale. It was the story of Musa, my murdered brother, which took a different form each time, according to my mother’s mood. In my memory, those nights are associated with rainy winters, with the dim light of the oil lamp in our hovel, and with Mama’s murmuring voice. Such nights didn’t come often, only when we were short on food, when it was cold, and, maybe, when Mama felt even more like a widow than usual. Oh, stories die, you know, and I can’t remember exactly what the poor woman told me, but she knew how to summon up unlikely things, tales of hand-to-hand combat between Musa, the invisible giant, and the gaouri, the roumi, the big fat Frenchman, the obese thief of sweat and land. And so, in our imaginations, my brother Musa was commissioned to perform different tasks: repay a blow, avenge an insult, recover a piece of confiscated land, collect a paycheck. All of a sudden, this legendary Musa acquired a horse and a sword and the aura of a spirit come back from the dead to redress injustice. And, well, you know how it goes. When he was alive, he had a reputation as a quick-tempered man with a fondness for impromptu boxing matches. Most of Mama’s tales, however, were chronicles of Musa’s last day, which was also, in a way, the first day of his immortality. Mama could narrate the events of that day in such staggering detail that they almost came to life. She never described a murder and a death; instead, she’d evoke a fantastic transformation, one that turned a simple young man from one of the poorer quarters of Algiers into an invincible, long-awaited hero, a kind of savior. The details would change. In some versions of the story, Musa had left the house a little earlier than usual, awakened by a prophetic dream or a terrifying voice that had pronounced his name. In others, he’d answered the call of some friends—uled el-huma, sons of the neighborhood—idle young men interested in skirts, cigarettes, and scars. An obscure discussion ensued and resulted in Musa’s death. I’m not sure: Mama had a thousand and one stories, and the truth meant little to me at that age. What was most important at those moments was my almost sensual closeness with Mama, our silent reconciliation during the night to come. The next morning, everything was always back in its place, my mother in one world and me in another. What can I tell you, Mr. Investigator, about a crime committed in a book? I don’t know what happened on that particular day, in that gruesome summer, between six o’clock in the morning and two in the afternoon, the hour of Musa’s death. And, in any case, after Musa was killed nobody came around to question us. There was no serious investigation. I have a hard time remembering what I myself did that day. In the morning, the usual neighborhood characters were awake and on the street. Down at one end, we had Tawi and his sons. Tawi was a heavyset fellow. Dragged his bad left leg, had a nagging cough, smoked a lot. And, early each morning, it was his habit to step outside and pee on a wall, as blithely as you please. Everybody knew him, because his ritual was so unvarying that he served as a clock; the broken cadence of his footsteps and his cough were the first signs that the new day had arrived on our street. Farther up on the right, there was El-Hadj, “the pilgrim”—which he was by genealogy, not because he’d made the trip to Mecca. El-Hadj was just his given name. He, too, was the silent type. His main occupations seemed to be striking his mother and eying his neighbors with a permanent air of defiance. On the near corner of the adjacent alley, a Moroccan had a café called El-Blidi. His sons were liars and petty thieves, capable of stealing all the fruit off every tree. They’d invented a game: they would throw matches into the sidewalk gutters, where the wastewater ran, and then follow the course of those matches. They never tired of doing that. I also remember an old woman, Taï bia, big, fat, childless, and very temperamental. There was something unsettling and even a little voracious in the way she looked at us—other women’s offspring—that made us giggle nervously. We were just a little collection of lice on the back of the huge geological animal that was the city, with its thousand alleys. So, on that particular day, nothing unusual. Even Mama, who loved omens and was sensitive to spirits, failed to detect anything abnormal. A routine day, in short—women calling to one another, laundry hung out on the terraces, street venders. No one could have heard a gunshot from so far away, a shot fired downtown, on the beach. Not even at the devil’s hour, two o’clock on a summer afternoon—the siesta hour. So, I repeat, nothing unusual. Later, of course, I thought about it and, little by little, I concluded that there had to be—among the thousand versions Mama offered, among her memory fragments and her still vivid intuitions—there had to be one version that was truer than the others. By telling me so many implausible tales and outright lies, Mama eventually aroused my suspicions and put my own intuitions in order. I reconstructed the whole thing. Musa’s frequent binges during that period, the scent floating in the air, his proud smile when he ran into his friends, their overserious, almost comical confabs, the way my brother had of playing with his knife and showing me his tattoos: Echedda fi Allah, “God is my support.” “March or die” on his right shoulder. “Be quiet” on his left forearm, under a drawing of a broken heart. This was the only book that Musa wrote. Shorter than a last sigh, just three sentences inscribed on the oldest paper in the world, his own skin. I remember his tattoos the way most people remember their first picture book. Other details? Oh, I don’t know, his overalls, his espadrilles, his prophet’s beard, his big hands, which tried to hold on to our father’s ghost, and his history with a nameless, honorless woman. Ah! The mystery woman! Provided that she existed at all. I know only her first name; at least, I presume it was hers. My brother had spoken it in his sleep that night, the night before his death: Zubida. A sign? Maybe. In any case, the day Mama and I left the neighborhood forever—Mama had decided to get away from Algiers and the sea—I’m sure I saw a woman staring at us. A very intense stare. She was wearing a short skirt and tacky stockings, and she’d done her hair the way the movie stars did in those days: although she was quite obviously a brunette, her hair was dyed blond. “Zubida forever,” ha-ha! Perhaps my brother had those words tattooed somewhere on his body as well—I don’t know for sure. But I am sure that it was her that day. It was early in the morning. We were setting out, Mama and I, leaving the house for good, and there she was, holding a little red purse, staring at us from some distance away. I can still see her lips and her huge eyes, which seemed to be asking us for something. I’m almost certain that it was her. At the time, I wanted it to be her, and I decided that it was, because that added something to the tale of my brother’s demise somehow. I needed Musa to have had an excuse, a reason. Without realizing it, I rejected the absurdity of his death; I needed a story to give him a shroud. Well, then. I pulled Mama by her haik, so that she wouldn’t see the woman. But she must have sensed something, because she made a horrible face and spat out a prodigiously vulgar insult. I turned around, but the woman had disappeared. And then we left. I remember the road to our new home, in the village of Hadjout, the fields whose crops weren’t destined for us, the naked sun, the other travellers on the dusty bus. The oil fumes nauseated me, but I loved the virile, almost comforting roar of the engine, like a kind of father that was snatching us, my mother and me, out of an enormous labyrinth of buildings, downtrodden people, shantytowns, dirty urchins, aggressive cops, and beaches fatal to Arabs. For the two of us, the city would always be the scene of the crime, the place where something pure and ancient was lost. Yes, Algiers, in my memory, is a dirty, corrupt creature, a dark, treacherous man-stealer. Buy the print » Let’s see, let me try to remember exactly. . . . How did we first learn of Musa’s death? I remember a kind of invisible cloud hovering over our street, and angry grownups talking loudly and gesticulating. At first, Mama told me that a gaouri had killed one of our neighbor’s sons while he was trying to defend an Arab woman and her honor. But, during the night, anxiety got inside our house, and I think Mama began to realize the truth. So did I, probably. And then, all of a sudden, I heard this long, low moan, swelling until it became immense, a huge mass of sound that destroyed our furniture and blew apart our walls and then the whole neighborhood and left me all alone. I remember starting to cry for no reason, just because everyone was looking at me. Mama had disappeared, and I was shoved outside, ejected by something more important than me, absorbed into some kind of collective disaster. Strange, don’t you think? I told myself, confusedly, that this probably had to do with my father, that he was definitely dead this time, which made me sob twice as hard. It was a long night; nobody slept. A constant stream of people came to offer their condolences. The grownups spoke to me solemnly. When I couldn’t understand what they were telling me, I contented myself with looking at their hard eyes, their shaking hands, and their shabby shoes. By the time dawn came, I was very hungry, and I fell asleep I don’t know where. No matter how much I dig around in my memory, I have no recollection at all of that day and the next, except of the smell of couscous. The days blurred into an interminable single day, like a broad, deep valley I meandered through. The last day of a man’s life doesn’t exist. Outside of storybooks, there’s no hope, nothing but soap bubbles bursting. That’s the best proof of our absurd existence, my dear friend: no one is granted a final day, only an accidental interruption of life. These days, my mother’s so old she looks like her own mother, or maybe her great-grandmother, or even her great-great-grandmother. Once we reach a certain age, time gives us the features of all our ancestors, combined in a soft jumble of reincarnations. And maybe that’s what the next world is—an endless corridor where all your ancestors are lined up, one after another. They turn toward their living descendant and simply wait, without words, without movement, their patient eyes fixed on a date. I don’t know my mother’s age, just as she has no idea how old I am. Before Independence, people did without exact dates; the rhythms of life were marked by births, epidemics, food shortages, and so on. My grandmother died of typhus, an episode that by itself served to establish a calendar. My father left on a December 1st, and since then that date has been a reference point for measuring the temperature of the heart, so to speak. You want the truth? I rarely go to see my mother nowadays. She lives in a house under a sky where a dead man and a lemon tree loiter. She spends her days sweeping every corner of that house in Hadjout, formerly known as Marengo, seventy kilometres from the capital. That was where I spent the second half of my childhood and part of my youth, before going to Algiers to learn a profession (government land administration) and then returning to Hadjout to practice it. We—my mother and I—had put as much distance as possible between us and the sound of breaking waves. Let’s take up the chronology again. We left Algiers—on that famous day when I was sure I’d spotted Zubida—and went to stay with an uncle and his family, who barely tolerated us. We lived in a hovel before being kicked out by the very people who’d taken us in. Then we lived in a little shed on the threshing floor of a colonial farm, where we both had jobs, Mama as a maid and I as an errand boy. The boss was this obese guy from Alsace who ended up smothered in his own fat, I believe. People said that he used to torture slackers by sitting on their chests. They also said that he had a protruding Adam’s apple because the body of an Arab he’d swallowed was lodged in his throat. I still have memories from that period: an old priest who sometimes brought us food, the jute sack my mother made into a kind of smock for me, the semolina dishes we’d eat on special occasions. I don’t want to tell you about our troubles, because at that time they were a matter only of hunger, not of injustice. In the evening, we kids would play marbles, and if one of us didn’t show up the following day that would mean that he was dead—and we’d keep on playing. It was a period of epidemics and famines. Rural life was hard. It revealed what the cities kept hidden—namely, that the country was starving to death. I was afraid, especially at night, of hearing the bleak sound of men’s footsteps, men who knew that Mama had no protector. Those were nights of waking and watchfulness, which I spent glued to her side. I was well and truly the uld el-assas, the night watchman’s son and heir. Strangely, we gravitated around Hadjout and the vicinity for years before we were able to settle down behind solid walls. Who knows how much cunning and patience it cost Mama to find us a house, the one she still lives in today? I don’t. In any case, she figured out what the right move was: she got herself hired as a housekeeper and waited, with me perched on her back, for Independence. The truth of the matter is that the house had belonged to a family of settlers who left in a hurry, and we ended up taking it over during the first days of Independence. It’s a three-room house with wallpapered walls, and in the courtyard a dwarf lemon tree that stares at the sky. There are two little sheds beside the house, and a wooden doorframe. I remember the vine that provided shade along the walls, and the strident peeping of the birds. Before we moved into the main house, Mama and I resided in an adjacent shack, which a neighbor uses as a grocery store today. You know, I don’t like to remember that period. It’s as if I were forced to beg for pity. When I was fifteen, I found a job as a farm laborer. Work was rare, and the nearest farm was three kilometres from the village. Do you know how I got the job? I’m going to confess: one day I got up before dawn and I let the air out of another worker’s bicycle tires so that I could show up earlier than he did and take his place. Yes, indeed, that’s hunger for you! I don’t want to play the victim, but it took us years to cross the dozen or so metres that separated our hovel from the settlers’ house, years of tiny, fettered steps, as if we were slogging through mud or quicksand in a nightmare. I believe more than ten years passed before we finally got our hands on that house and declared it liberated: our property! Yes, yes, we acted like everybody else during the first days of freedom: we broke down the door, took the tableware and the candlesticks. But where was I? It’s a long story, and I’m getting a bit lost. After Musa’s murder, while we were still living in Algiers, my mother converted her anger into a long, spectacular period of mourning that won her the sympathy of the neighbor women and a kind of legitimacy that allowed her to go out on the street, mingle with men, work in other people’s houses, sell spices, and do housework, without running the risk of being judged. Her femininity had died and, with it, men’s suspicions. I saw little of her during that time. I’d spend entire days waiting for her while she walked all over the city, conducting her investigation into Musa’s death, questioning people who knew him, recognized him, or had crossed his path for the last time in the course of that year, 1942. Some neighbor ladies kept me fed, and the other children in the neighborhood showed me the respect you give to seriously ill or broken people. I found my status—as “the dead man’s brother”—almost agreeable; in fact, I didn’t begin to suffer from it until I was approaching adulthood, when I learned to read and realized what an unjust fate had befallen my brother, who died in a book. After his passing, the way my time was structured changed. I lived my life in absolute freedom for exactly forty days. The funeral didn’t take place until then, you see. The neighborhood imam must have found the whole thing disturbing. For Musa’s body was never found, and missing persons rarely have funerals. . . . My mother looked for my brother everywhere—in the morgue, at the police station in Belcourt—and she knocked on every door. To no avail. Musa had vanished; he was absolutely, perfectly, incomprehensibly dead. There had been two of them in that place of sand and salt, him and his killer only. Of the murderer we knew almost nothing. He was el-roumi, the foreigner, “the stranger.” People in the neighborhood showed my mother his picture in the newspaper, but for us he was just like all the other colonists who’d grown fat on so many stolen harvests. There was nothing special about him, except for the cigarette stuck in the corner of his mouth; his features were instantly forgotten, confused with those of his people. My mother visited cemeteries, pestered my brother’s former comrades. Her efforts were in vain, but they revealed her talent for idle chatter, and her mourning period evolved into a surprising comedy, a marvellous act she put on and refined until it became a masterpiece. Virtually widowed for the second time, she turned her personal drama into a kind of business that required all who came near her to make an effort of compassion. She invented a range of illnesses in order to gather the whole tribe of female neighbors around her whenever she had so much as a migraine headache. She often pointed a finger at me as if I were an orphan, and she withdrew her affection from me very quickly, replacing it with the narrowed eyes of suspicion and the hard gaze of admonition. Oddly enough, I was treated like the dead brother, and Musa like a survivor whose coffee was prepared fresh at the end of the day, whose bed was made for him, and whose footsteps were listened for, even when he was coming from very far away, from downtown Algiers and the neighborhoods that were closed to us at the time. I was condemned to a secondary role because I had nothing in particular to offer. I felt guilty for being alive but also responsible for a life that wasn’t my own. I was the guardian, the assas, like my father, watching over another body. I also remember that weird funeral: crowds of people; discussions lasting well into the night; us children, attracted by the light bulbs and the many candles; and then an empty grave and a prayer for the departed. After the religious waiting period of forty days, Musa had been declared dead—swept away by the sea—and therefore, absurdly, the service that Islam prescribes for the drowned was performed. Then everyone left, except my mother and me. It was morning. I was cold even under the blanket, shivering. Musa had been dead for weeks. I heard the outside sounds—a passing bicycle, old Tawi’s coughing, the squeaking of chairs, the raising of iron shutters. In my head, every voice corresponded to a woman, a time of life, a concern, a mood, or even to the kind of wash that was going to be hung out that day. There was a knock at our door. Some women had come to visit Mama. I knew the script by heart: a silence, followed by sobs, then hugs and kisses; still more tears; then one of the women would lift the curtain that divided the room, look at me, smile distractedly, and grab the coffee jar or something else. The scene continued until sometime around noon. Only in the afternoon, after the ritual of the scarf soaked in orange-flower water and wrapped around her head, after some interminable moaning and a long, very long silence, would Mama remember me and take me in her arms. But I knew that it was Musa she wanted to find there, not me. And I let her do it. As I said, Musa’s body was never found. Consequently, my mother imposed on me a strict duty of reincarnation. For instance, as soon as I had grown a little, she made me wear my dead brother’s clothes—his undershirts, his dress shirts, his shoes—even though they were still too big for me, and that went on until I wore them out. I was forbidden to wander away from her, to walk by myself, to sleep in unknown places, and, before we left Algiers, to venture anywhere near the beach. The sea was off-limits. Mama taught me to fear its mildest suction—so effectively that even today, when I’m walking along the shore, where the waves die, the sensation of the sand giving way under my feet feels like the beginning of drowning. Deep down, Mama wanted to believe that the water was the culprit, that the water had carried off her son’s body. My body, therefore, became the only visible trace of her dead son, which likely explained my physical cowardice—which I, of course, compensated for with a restless but, to be frank, ambitionless intelligence. I was sick a lot. And throughout every illness she’d watch over my body with an almost sinful attention, with a concern tainted by a vague undercurrent of incest. She’d reproach me for getting the smallest scratch, as if I had wounded Musa himself. And so I was deprived of the healthy joys of youth, the awakening of the senses, the clandestine eroticism of adolescence. I grew silent and ashamed. I avoided hammams and playing with others, and in the winter I wore djellabahs that hid me from people’s eyes. It took me years to become reconciled with my body, with myself. In fact, to this day I don’t know if I have. I’ve always had a stiffness in my bearing, owing to my guilt at being alive. Like a true night watchman’s son, I sleep very little, and badly—I panic at the idea of closing my eyes and falling I don’t know where without my name to anchor me. Mama gave me her fears, and Musa his corpse. What could a teen-ager do, trapped like that between death and his mother? I remember the rare days when I accompanied my mother as she walked the streets of Algiers in search of information about my vanished brother. She would set a brisk pace and I’d follow, my eyes fixed on her haik so as not to lose her. And thus an amusing intimacy was created, the source of a brief period of tenderness between us. With her widow’s language and her calculated whimpering, Mama collected clues and mixed genuine information with scraps from the previous night’s dream. I can still see her with one of Musa’s friends, clinging fearfully to his arm as we passed through French neighborhoods, where we were considered intruders. “In this company, Simmons, we hold our hands steady in the middle and shake our bodies.”Buy the print » Yes, we made an odd couple, roaming the streets of the capital like that! Much later, after the story of Musa’s death had become a famous book and departed the country, leaving my mother and me in oblivion—even though we were the ones who had suffered the loss of the book’s sacrificial victim—I often went back in memory to the Belcourt neighborhood and our investigations, remembering how we’d scrutinize windows and building façades, looking for clues. One day, Mama finally got a fragile lead she could follow: someone had given her an address. Now Algiers seemed a frightening labyrinth whenever we ventured outside our perimeter, but Mama walked without stopping, passing a cemetery and a covered market and some cafés, through a jungle of stares and cries and car horns, until she finally stopped short and gazed at a house across the street from us. It was a fine day, and I was lagging behind her, panting, because she’d been walking very fast. All along the way, I’d heard her muttering insults and threats, praying to God and her ancestors, or maybe to the ancestors of God himself, who knows. I resented her excitement a little, without knowing exactly why. It was a two-story house, and the windows were closed—nothing else to report. The roumis in the street were eying us with great distrust. We remained there in silence for a long time. An hour, maybe two, and then Mama, without so much as a glance at me, crossed the street and knocked resolutely on the door. An old Frenchwoman opened it. The light behind Mama made it hard for the lady to see her, but she put her hand over her brow like a visor and examined her visitor carefully, and I watched uneasiness, incomprehension, and finally terror come over her face. She turned red, fear rose in her eyes, and she seemed about to scream. Then I realized that Mama was reeling off the longest string of curses she’d ever uttered. Agitated, the lady at the door tried to push Mama away. I was afraid for Mama; I was afraid for us. All of a sudden, the Frenchwoman collapsed unconscious on her doorstep. People had stopped to watch. I could make out their shadows behind me—little groups had formed here and there—and then someone shouted the word “Police!” A woman cried out in Arabic, telling Mama to hurry, to get away fast. That was when Mama turned around and shouted, as if she were addressing all the roumis in the world, “The sea will swallow you all!” Then she grabbed me, and we took off running, like a pair of maniacs. Once we had got back home, she barricaded herself behind a wall of silence. We went to bed without supper. Later, she would explain to the neighbors that she had found the house where the murderer grew up and had insulted his grandmother, maybe, and then she’d add, “Or one of his relatives, or at least a roumia like him.” The murderer had lived somewhere in a neighborhood not far from the sea. There was a building with a vaguely sagging upper story above a café, poorly protected by a few trees, but its windows were always closed in those days, so I think Mama had insulted an anonymous old Frenchwoman with no connection to our tragedy. Long after Independence, a new tenant opened the shutters and eliminated the last possibility of a mystery. This is all to tell you that no one we met was ever able to say that he’d crossed the murderer’s path or looked into his eyes or understood his motives. Mama questioned a great many people, so many that I eventually felt ashamed for her, as if she were begging for money and not clues. Her investigations served as a ritual to lessen her pain, and her comings and goings in the French part of the city turned, however incongruously, into opportunities for extended walks. I recall the day when we finally arrived at the sea. The sky was gray, and a few metres away from me was our family’s huge and mighty adversary, the thief of Arabs, the killer of young men in overalls. It was indeed the last witness on Mama’s list. As soon as we got there, she pronounced Sidi Abderrahman’s name and then, several times, the name of God, ordered me to stay away from the water, sat down, and massaged her aching ankles. I stood behind her, a child facing the immensity of both the crime and the horizon. What did I feel? Nothing except the wind on my skin—it was autumn, the autumn after the murder. I tasted the salt. I saw the dense gray waves. That’s all. The sea was like a wall with soft, moving edges. Far off, up in the sky, there were some heavy white clouds. I started picking up things that were lying on the sand: seashells, glass shards, bottle caps, clumps of dark seaweed. The sea told us nothing, and Mama remained motionless on the shore, like someone bending over a grave. Finally, she stood up straight, looked attentively right and left, and said, in a hoarse voice, “God’s curse be upon you!” Then she took me by the hand and led me away from the sand, as she’d done so often before. I followed her. One more memory: the visits to the hereafter, on Fridays, at the summit of Bab-el-Oued. I’m talking about the El-Kettar Cemetery, otherwise known as “the Perfumery,” because of the former jasmine distillery situated nearby. Every other Friday, we’d go to the cemetery to visit Musa’s empty grave. Mama would whimper, which I found uncalled for and ridiculous, because there was nothing in that hole. I remember the mint that grew in the cemetery, the trees, the winding aisles, Mama’s white haik against the too blue sky. Everybody in the neighborhood knew that the hole was empty, knew that Mama filled it with her prayers and her inventions. That cemetery was the place where I awakened to life. It was where I became aware that I had a right to the fire of my presence in the world—yes, I had a right to it!—despite the absurdity of my condition, which consisted of pushing a corpse to the top of a hill before it rolled back down, endlessly. Those days, the cemetery days, were the first days when I turned to pray not toward Mecca but toward the world. Nowadays, I’m working on better versions of those prayers. But back then I had discovered, in some obscure way, a form of sensuality. How can I explain it to you? The angle of the light, the vigorous blue of the sky, and the wind woke in me something more disturbing than the simple satisfaction you feel after a need has been met. Remember, I wasn’t quite ten years old, and therefore still clinging to my mother’s breast. That cemetery had the attraction of a playground for me. My mother never guessed that it was there that I definitively buried Musa one day, mutely shouting at him to leave me alone. Precisely there, in El-Kettar, an Arab cemetery. Today, it’s a dirty place, inhabited by fugitives and drunks. I’m told that marble is stolen from the tombs each and every night. You want to go and see it? It’ll be a waste of time—you won’t find anyone there, and you especially won’t find a trace of that grave, which was dug like the prophet Yusuf’s well. If the body’s not in it, you can’t prove anything. Mama wasn’t entitled to anything. Not to apologies before Independence, not to a pension afterward. “The Ugly Duckling didn’t know why he was so attracted to swan culture.”Buy the print » After Musa died, my mother turned fierce, in a way. Try to imagine the woman: snatched away from her tribe, given in marriage to a husband who didn’t know her and who hastened to get away from her, the mother of two sons, one dead and one a child too silent to give her the proper cues, a woman who lost two men and was forced to work for roumis in order to survive. She developed a taste for her martyrdom. Did I love her? Of course. For us, a mother is half the world. But I’ve never forgiven her for the way she treated me. She resented me for a death she felt I had somehow refused to undergo, and so she punished me. I don’t know—I had a lot of resistance in me, and she could sense that, in a confused sort of way. Mama knew the art of making ghosts live and, conversely, was very good at annihilating those close to her, drowning them in the monstrous torrents of her made-up tales. She can’t read, but I promise you, my friend, she would have told you the story of our family and my brother better than I can. She lied not out of a desire to deceive but in order to correct reality and to mitigate the absurdity that had struck her world and mine. Musa’s passing destroyed her, but, paradoxically, it also introduced her to the morbid pleasure of a never-ending mourning. For a long time, not a year passed without my mother swearing that she’d found Musa’s body, heard his breathing or his footsteps, recognized the imprint of his shoes. And, for a long time, this made me feel impossibly ashamed of her—and, later, it pushed me to learn a language that could serve as a barrier between her frenzies and me. Yes, the language. The one I read, the one I speak today, the one that’s not hers. Hers is rich, full of imagery, vitality, sudden jolts, and improvisations, but not too big on precision. Mama’s grief lasted so long that she needed a new idiom in which to express it. In her language, she spoke like a prophetess, recruited extemporaneous mourners, and cried out against the double outrage that had consumed her life: a husband swallowed up by air, a son by water. I had to learn a different language. To survive. After my presumed fifteenth birthday, when we withdrew to Hadjout, I became a stern and serious scholar. Books gradually enabled me to name things, to organize the world with my own words. In Hadjout, I also discovered trees and a sky that I could almost reach. Eventually I was admitted to a school where there were a few other little natives like me. That helped to distract me from Mama and her disturbing way of watching me eat and grow, as if she were fattening me up for a sacrifice. Those were strange years. I felt alive when I was on the street, in school, or at the farms where I worked, but going home meant stepping into a grave or, at least, falling ill. Mama and Musa were both waiting for me, each in a different way, and I was almost obliged to explain myself, to justify the hours I’d wasted not sharpening the knife of our family’s vengeance. In the neighborhood, our shack was considered a sinister place. The other children referred to me as “the widow’s son.” People were afraid of Mama, but they also suspected her of having committed a crime, a bizarre crime—otherwise, why leave the city to come here and wash dishes for the roumis? We must have presented a peculiar spectacle when we arrived in Hadjout: a mother hiding her carefully folded newspaper clippings in her bosom, a teen-ager with his eyes on his bare feet, and some raggedy baggage. Right around that time, the murderer was climbing the last steps of his fame. It was the nineteen-fifties; the Frenchwomen wore short, flowered dresses, and the sun bit at their breasts.

We—my family, I mean—were in bumper-to-bumper traffic on our way to my mother-in-law’s house for Sunday lunch when our phones flashed red and the Alert sounded overhead for the second time that day. Like the other drivers on the highway, I slowed to a stop and yanked up the parking brake. Once the three of us were safely crouched down on the hot road beside the car, Neal distributed the headsocks—our name for the gas masks—and I turned around to make sure Sarah had her straps tight enough for a good seal. She shrugged me off. “I can do it myself, Mom,” she said, already irritated, because the mask would ruin her makeup and also because she’d missed church that morning. I was sympathetic—about the makeup, at least. “My knees are on fire,” she shouted, lifting one at a time off the asphalt. “Mine, too,” I said. “I’ll try to remember to keep a quilt in the car from now on.” We were going to be late for lunch. No way around it. We made this trip every other month, a ritual going back to the early years of our marriage: Sunday lunches with Neal’s mother, Edina, and his twin brother, Cecil, and Cecil’s unfortunate daughter, Mira. Neal was on all fours behind me, his head hanging low. I shouted back to him, “Maybe we should call your mother and let her know?” I wasn’t sure if he could hear me over the noise: This is an Alert. This is an Alert. This is an Alert. Have you ever wondered whose voice it actually is? Did they pick a random guy off the street to record the Alert, or did they listen to a thousand audition tapes before settling on that relaxed, bassy timbre? It’s a voice that surrounds you, wraps you up like a soft blanket. The AlertBots blasting the message at you are way up in the sky—I realize this—but sometimes it sounds as if the voice were right there beside you, or even inside your own head. It’s a voice that drowns out all other thought, which, it occurs to me now, may be the intended effect. Perhaps the voice was designed this way, to make us cattle-brained. So as to prevent pandemonium? Ahead of us and behind us on the road, shining in the sun, were hundreds of cars, and even more passengers, all of them frozen just like us, families on their hands and knees and with monstrous black insectoid silicone masks strapped over their faces. Even after we’d lived this way for a full year, it was an otherworldly sight. I often think we look like an alien race preparing for conquest. Preparing to be conquested, is what I mean to say. “This is absurd,” Neal said. He stood and looked up at the sky with his hand shielding his goggled eyes from the sun. “Get down!” I yelled. “I don’t hear or see anything.” “Of course not. It’s all too far up.” Somewhere up there, above the clouds, in the high hazy blue-black atmosphere, the war is being fought, always—by swarms of Snakes (the long skinny drones that drop bombs) and Jailbirds (the ones that carry germs and gases) and of course Sweepers and Guardian-Zs (which keep the bombs and germs and gases from reaching us) and all the other drones and micro-drones and nano-drones the cable news hasn’t come up with fun names for yet. I’ve seen the photos that show up in the newspapers and on the countless drone-watch sites, but those images could be of almost anything: fast-moving birds, streaks of light, a bug on the lens, a flying saucer. “I’m sick of it,” Neal said, once we were in the car and (barely) moving again. “Look,” he said, and twisted in his seat to show me the back of his head. “What am I looking for?” I asked, both hands on the wheel, because I am a cautious driver, if nothing else. “The straps,” he said. “The straps are rubbing my head raw.” He was right. I could see the faint banded outline across the back of his head where his straw-blond hair had been thinned to a fuzz. “Oh, you look fine,” I said. “You’re just being vain. No one will ever notice that. Have you tried loosening the straps some?” His mask was in his lap, looking up at him. “They’re as loose as they’ll go. I’ve just got a fat head, I guess.” I pattered my fingers along the back of his neck. It’s something I do when he’s agitated. “Not now,” he said, swatting my hand away. “Whatever,” I said. We’d been sniping at each other recently. I’d been after him for trading in his truck and leasing a new one without consulting me. Neal had been irritated over some texts between me and my high-school boyfriend—I’d been a little too cavalier with the “x”s and the “o”s. I’d like to believe that the low-wattage stress of all the Alerts was responsible for these flareups. We were off the highway now, driving along a small road that ran parallel to the train tracks. Edina lives in a town an hour away from us. We were getting close to her house when all our phones flashed red and it sounded again: This is an Alert, on repeat, ad nauseam. Neal smacked the glove compartment with his palm. “We’re never going to get there if this keeps up,” he said. I stopped the car across the street from a white clapboard Methodist church. The sign out front said, “You know how to interpret the face of the earth and sky, but why do you not know how to interpret the present time?” Inside the church, all the congregants were no doubt down on their knees, praying in their headsocks. I’d caught Sarah doing this before, praying during the Alerts. Theoretically, we were members of a Lutheran church (theoretically because we hardly ever went), but recently Sarah had started attending services, plus Wednesday-night meetings, at a nondenominational church along with a friend. A boy, I should say. His name was Marcus, and for her birthday he’d given Sarah a study Bible that she’d since highlighted and marked up with so many notes. I didn’t know what to make of it. Pills, liquor, unprotected sex, ugly death by biological weapon—these were the things I’d feared for her. Never study Bibles. “Marcus says there are drones in the Bible,” she’d told me once. “The stars will fall from the sky at the end of days.” “And what else does Marcus say?” I asked. “Don’t be like that,” she’d said. “You should look it up for yourself.” Sarah didn’t appear to be praying now. We were in position alongside the car. My shoulder was touching the front tire. Brake dust smudged my dress. I could feel the heat of the car and the road and the sun. I was wearing too much perfume. All of us were sweating profusely. Beneath the omnipresent boom of This is an Alert, the church bells pealed. At first, I wondered if this might be an act of defiance, if the person responsible for the tolling was doing it as some sort of protest, but then it occurred to me that the bells were likely automated and set to a timer. Just beyond the steeple, high up in the air, I saw what looked like one of the AlertBots sweeping across the sky, trumpeting the voice at us. I know that’s unlikely, but they are known to fly at lower altitudes than the rest. As expected, we were late for lunch. Edina was upset. She met us at the door, barefoot, arms crossed. “You know you got to add thirty minutes to your trip,” she said. “Always, always.” Like most of the houses in the neighborhood, hers was a one-story brick place, set about a hundred feet off the road. The neighboring yards were littered with broken trampolines, motorbikes, that sort of thing. I’m not being snobby—that’s just what it’s like. Our own house is only a little nicer. (Neal teaches economics at the high school and paints interiors in the summer. I do billing for a dentist.) Edina is a no-nonsense woman, wiry and strong, a breast-cancer survivor. Her hair returned feathery and gray after the chemo, and she keeps it short and likes to wear a do-rag. We followed her through the small house, across the recessed shag-carpeted den, and into the cramped kitchen. The oven clock was blinking, needing to be reset. The wall behind the stove was splattered with yellow cooking grease. She’d made us a proper Southern lunch: collards, mac-and-cheese casserole, fried chicken, the whole deal. Neal had grown up eating like this, and though he claimed not to mind my flaxseed pancakes and whole-wheat spaghetti with black-bean meatballs, I couldn’t help noticing how high he loaded his plate anytime we ate at his mother’s. The four of us helped ourselves to what was on the stove and then sat down at a card table on the small screen porch off the back of the house. “Your brother couldn’t be here for lunch, but he’s coming over with Mira in a while,” Edina said to Neal. “You got your bathing suits with you, right?” Edina had recently added an aboveground pool to her back yard. She’d called me over the phone at least twice to remind me about the bathing suits. “Dang,” I said. “I knew we forgot something.” “I’ll call Cecil and tell him to bring one of Mira’s extras,” Edina said, undeterred. “For Sarah.” Mira and Sarah are cousins. They’re both fourteen years old, but Mira—and I really don’t know how else to say this—is fat. And it’s no wonder: the girl slurps up tubs of Mello Yello all day long. None of her suits would fit Sarah in a million years. “Don’t worry about it, Granny,” Sarah said, diplomatically. “I’m not really in the mood to swim anyway. I’ll just watch today.” “Just watch?” Edina said. “This is a pool party. Try to enjoy yourself or you’ll never—” The voice boomed: This is an Alert. This is an Alert. Neal took one more bite of mashed potatoes and gravy before pulling the duffel off the back of his chair. He removed our headsocks. Edina had left hers in the kitchen. Neal, dutiful son, marched into the house and grabbed it for her. We slid down to the floor. I could barely see anyone’s eyes through the plastic lenses. How many times had we sat looking at one another like this? Waiting for something terrible to happen? We looked just like every other family in the country, of course. Everywhere you go, it’s the same. The old couple watching sitcom reruns, in masks. The yoga class holding child’s pose, everyone in spandex and masks. The football fields full of players in masks instead of helmets, the scoreboard timers paused, entire stadiums packed with fans wearing foam hands and masks that smear their face paint. Neal reached up for his iced tea. He pulled his headsock sideways, away from his mouth, and sipped. “What time will Cecil and Mira be here?” I shouted at Edina over the Alerts. She shrugged. “He said after lunch. So anytime, I guess.” I don’t much care for Cecil. He’s Neal’s identical twin, but you’d hardly know it anymore. Recently, he has begun to look like a man with a barely concealed illness: pronounced cheekbones, sunken eyes. Sometimes I think of him as Neal’s mean corpse. Years ago, he slipped into my bedroom one night and tried to pass himself off as Neal—as a goof, he later claimed—but I knew it was him by the way he kissed me. That’s not the only reason I don’t like him. He has a habit of taking jokes too far, of making them unnecessarily cruel or perverse. “I love this rabbit so much I could marry it,” I remember Mira saying once, as a chubby little girl, about her new pet bunny. “She loves it so much she’d just about rape it,” Cecil said, looking at all of us, expecting a big laugh and getting none. I tried to spend as little time around Cecil as possible, though I did feel sorry for Mira—so fat, her father so snide, her mother so dead. This is an— The voice crackled away, finally, into nothingness, and we were alone again with our lardy lunches. We clambered back up to our chairs, arranged our paper napkins on our laps. “I swear,” Neal said, forking his collards. “Can’t we get through just one meal? It’s bad for my digestion.” As if on cue, the voice started right back up. Neal let go of his fork, and it clacked down against his plate. Of course, the Alerts weren’t usually like this, so excessive, so many in a single day, and it was easy to feel irritated. We crawled under the table again with our masks, but as soon as we had them on our faces the Alert was over. “Next time I’m not even bothering with it,” Neal said, taking his chair. “You don’t mean that,” I said. “Be honest,” he said. “Don’t you ever wonder what the point is?” “One day you’ll thank me for embarrassing you in front of the entire Internet.”Buy the print » “The point, you idiot, is that it might save your life one day,” Edina barked at him. “Ruthie Roble, down the street—a man her daughter used to work with at the fishery, he was living in Nebraska, and his whole family got sick and died after they forgot their masks in the car.” “Somehow I doubt that,” Neal said. “If that’s true, it’s terrible,” I said. “Why would Ruthie lie about such a thing?” Edina said. “Of course it’s true.” “I’m not saying she lied, Edina,” I said. “Just that it sounds awfully secondhand. Surely it would have been in the news.” The truth is that we were always hearing stories like this one: the guy in California who got blown up on his way to work; the Sweeper that crashed right through some poor family’s roof at dinnertime; the anti-mask group in Oklahoma whose members all died holding hands when a Jailbird dropped a chemical bomb right into their compound. So many almost believable rumors. Edina waved me off. “That’s the world we live in now. A whole war right over our heads. Who knows how many countries are involved. And if anything gets through, if anything does manage to come all the way down, that’s it for us.” She snapped her fingers. “We wear the masks. We take cover. It’s what we do. It’s the price we pay for staying alive.” This is an Alert. This is an Alert. Edina, Sarah, and I all slipped on our headsocks and lowered ourselves down to the floor on our hands and knees. Neal stayed in his chair, sitting up even straighter than usual. He nibbled on a fried chicken leg, tearing away a dark, greasy sliver and chewing on it viciously, happily. I couldn’t believe it. What if he died? What if he started bleeding from every orifice, right there in front of us at the lunch table? “Get down here,” I yelled, tugging at his shorts. “I didn’t raise you to be so stupid,” Edina said. It was odd, Edina and me being on the same side of an argument, and I’ll admit that it did make me reconsider my position, a little bit. We watched Neal chow down on more chicken. Then, without any warning, Sarah yanked off her mask and climbed back up into her chair. She squeezed some lemon into her tea. She seemed proud of herself. “No,” I said. “Not you, too.” “If Dad doesn’t have to, then why should I?” “Because you’re only fourteen. Because you’ve got your whole life ahead of you,” I said. This is an Alert. This is an Alert. Sarah slumped back in her chair. “Marcus says they use a voice instead of a siren because it’s supposed to remind us of God.” “I don’t want to hear what Marcus says,” I said. “It’s literally a voice in the sky!” she said, laughing. She started pecking at her food again, ignoring me. I might have resisted more if it weren’t for the fact that the Alert was bringing on one of my headaches. I could feel it, just behind my eyes, that bulleting throb. I dug through my purse for the aspirin. I slid my mask up to swallow the pills. The sweat cooled on my face, and I could breathe again. If my family was going to die, I didn’t want to be left alone. Not with Edina. I climbed back up into my chair and joined them at the table. “That’s the spirit,” Neal said, smiling at me. “Life continues. We will not be afraid.” I flattened my napkin and draped it across my lap. Never had such a small gesture felt so daring—so bold. I don’t know how to describe it. After so much ducking and covering, it was liberating to hear the alert-voice and simply ignore it. Edina was still on the floor, her mask snug over her do-rag. Looking at her, I began to pity her, this poor woman: she’d survived cancer only to live like this? In a perpetual state of fear? And to think that I’d been living the same reality until only a few moments earlier. The voice broke off midsentence, and Edina emerged from under the table. She sat there, quietly, not even touching her food. “You know,” Neal said, “I think I’m in the mood for a swim after all.” He pushed away from the table and began unbuttoning his shirt. He kicked off his boat shoes. He dropped his shirt on the floor and then stepped out of his shorts. He was standing there in his underwear. “Gross,” Sarah said, laughing, amazed. We watched him open the screen door and descend the wooden steps to the yard. The pool was a giant squatty cylinder, just a few feet from the house. Neal climbed the metal ladder and fell into the water face first, belly flopping. He stayed underwater for a long time and then started doing the backstroke. “Feels fantastic,” he shouted to us. I wasn’t sure what had come over him—or me. I had a sudden urge to strip down and join him in my bra and panties. But right then, unfortunately, Cecil and Mira came around the corner of the house, already in their bathing suits. Mira had a long pink foam noodle over her left shoulder and a little white dog under her right arm. The dog’s name was Yoda, a bichon frise, and he peed in the grass as soon as she set him down. “Don’t even tell me you’re skinny-dipping in there,” Cecil said to Neal. Neal swam to the edge of the pool and spat some water at his brother. “Watch it,” Cecil said. “Hey, now.” Mira waved at Sarah through the screen. “I’m not swimming,” Mira said, in a monotone. “I just want to tan some.” She held up a brown bottle of tanning oil. “I didn’t even bring a suit,” Sarah said. “But I guess I could sit in the chairs with you.” I helped Edina clear the plates off the table and take them into the kitchen. “Don’t be upset,” I told her. “We’ll wear the masks again. Of course we will. Everyone’s just feeling worn down, that’s all. It’s like you said—it’s a party.” She grimaced and started scrubbing the plates. When I went back out in the yard, Cecil was in the pool with Neal. Both of them were guzzling beers from a Styrofoam cooler Cecil had brought. Cecil looked even thinner than the last time I’d seen him, his ribs poking through his moon-white skin. He and Neal crushed the empty cans and tossed them over the side of the pool into the grass. Cecil asked if I would bring them two more from the cooler. Predictably, he splashed me. And you know something? I didn’t really mind. I wasn’t bothered by it. It was so hot out, and there was something in the air—a crackle, an electricity, a vibe, whatever you want to call it. It’s that feeling you get before you jump off a train trestle into a lake you don’t know the depth of. The feeling you get when a man who’s not your husband gives you a look, from across a restaurant or a party, and you just know that if you wanted him (and you sort of do) he’d be yours. “Neal says y’all are done wearing the masks,” Cecil said. “He’s says you’ve had enough.” “I’m not sure it’s a permanent thing,” I said. “Well, he sure has me convinced,” Cecil said. “I always thought it was a bunch of bullshit anyway.” A few minutes later, it was back: This is an Alert. Cecil and Neal each drank another beer. Sarah and Mira were lounging in beach chairs next to the house, flipping lazily through magazines from Mira’s bag. Mira’s phone, nestled between her legs, flashed red. This is an Alert. This is an Alert. Yoda ran circles and yapped. Mira said that the dog did this every single time there was an Alert. Through the kitchen window, I could see Edina in her mask, watching us, her face elongated by the black silicone proboscis, like some kind of praying mantis. The sight of her gave me a shudder. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself. The urge to find a spot and crouch welled up in me. I wondered if this was just a Pavlovian response. I walked around the perimeter of the pool to be closer to Neal. “You think this is a good idea?” I asked him. He smiled and ducked under the water, his hair fanning out across the surface. He kept his right hand, the beer hand, raised in the air, above the water. When he came back up, face dripping, he reported that he could barely hear the voice under there. I took off my dress, dropping it in the grass, and got into the pool. The water was warm, almost hot. My bra stuck to my breasts. Cecil’s eyes darted at me. I stayed away from him, but I won’t lie: I may have been taunting him a little. I hugged Neal and wrapped my legs around his waist. I kissed him hard and tasted the beer in his mouth. I tugged him underwater, and we sat on the bottom with our eyes open. Faintly, I could still hear the Alert, but it was like a voice from another world. Under the water we were safe and protected. Nothing could harm us down there. We were still underwater when the Alert ended. Edina was waiting for us at the edge of the pool when we surfaced, her face imprinted with red creases. “At least protect your girls,” she pleaded with the three of us. “You can act like fools all you want, but it’s your job to make sure your kids are safe.” “They’ll be fine, Mom,” Neal said. “Just relax. It’s a pool party, for God’s sake. We all deserve a little bit of fun, from time to time.” I saw Edina’s point, of course. It was one thing for Neal and me to behave this way, but Sarah was just a teen-ager, and it was on us to protect her. I watched her spray tanning oil across her legs and arms, something I normally would have forbidden. All our rules were disintegrating at once, it seemed. Mira had pop-country music blasting on her cell phone. I floated on my back for a moment, gazing up through the pine-tree limbs at the sky. I was searching, I guess, for any evidence of the war up there. Supposedly, people have spotted exhaust trails, puffs of smoke, and even explosive bursts of light on clear nights. Maybe, if we’d seen something like that, the danger would have seemed more real to us. “You know what irks me?” Cecil said. “They never even asked us if we wanted the warnings. Maybe I don’t want to know every time my life’s in danger, you know?” “It’s true,” Neal said. “There was never any real discussion about it. It all happened so fast. One day things were normal and the next we all had to carry masks around.” Cecil sloshed out of the water, his skinny legs dripping, and he ran around the corner of the house in his sagging-wet suit. A few minutes later he returned, grass stuck to his feet, hair slicked back. In his hand he had a small black gun. “What on earth?” Edina asked. “Not another gun, Cecil, please. What’s it for?” “I got a permit for this one,” he said, as if that answered her question. “That a Glock?” Neal asked, almost scientifically, his arms hanging over the lip of the pool. At home we had a hunting rifle but no handguns. “Glock, yeah,” Cecil said, serious-faced. He pointed the gun at the sky and squinted. The dog sniffed at his feet. “Stop it, Yoda,” he said, shaking his leg in a small circle, not bothering to look down. Neal climbed out of the pool. His boxers suctioned his legs and crotch until he peeled the fabric off them with his fingers. He stood by his brother in the yard. Side by side, gazing up toward the sun, their chins raised and hair wet, they resembled each other more than they had in years, a fact I found slightly disconcerting. Edina reached for the gun. “Don’t you dare fire it,” she said. Her hand fell over the end of the barrel. “Oh, just let him shoot it,” I said. “If it’ll make him feel better.” Cecil’s index finger was on the trigger, and for a moment I thought he might shoot a hole through Edina’s hand. But he shook her loose and marched ten feet away from everyone. Mira started giggling, and I wondered if she’d seen her father do this before, if this was a familiar stunt. The stunt being, I suppose, Get Drunk and Shoot at Armed Robots in the Sky. I was the only one in the pool now, Mira’s pink noodle between my legs like a horse. Sarah abandoned her magazine at the end of her chair and came over to the pool to stand near me. She had her arms crossed. “You don’t think he’ll actually hit anything, do you?” she whispered, and looked up into the sky. “How far do bullets go?” “Not far enough,” I said, uncertainly. Right then, the voice returned for what seemed like the hundredth time that day: This is an Alert. This is an Alert. “So, before passing judgment, please consider that science now shows that the male brain is not fully developed until never.”Buy the print » I know this isn’t possible—because the voice never changes—but it sounded angrier to me than usual, a noise with teeth. Like God was upset. Edina sprinted up the wooden steps and into the house. All the daring had left me now. Maybe it was the introduction of the gun that had killed my nerve. I could feel the euphoria of the afternoon lifting, evaporating, and what was left was the bottomless apprehension that we were all going to die. I wanted us back in our headsocks. I wanted us safe again. I climbed out of the pool and looked around for a towel. My pubic hair was dark through my panties. I could feel Cecil watching me. “Come on,” I said to Sarah, and grabbed her hand. “Let’s get inside.” She slipped away from me. “You don’t need to worry about me, Mom. You don’t. I’m not afraid of dying.” I stared into her eyes and saw that it was true: she had no fear of death. That frightened me more than the Alerts ever had. I was the mother of a child hungry for the end times. Is there anything more tragic? “But you should be afraid,” I managed to say. “We all should.” “Well, I’m not. Why should I be afraid when I know what comes next? Marcus says if Jesus was here—like, here right now, in this very back yard—there’s no way he’d put on a gas mask and stick his head between his legs.” I didn’t know what to say. Sarah wasn’t Jesus. She was a fourteen-year-old girl with a study Bible and a self-righteous boyfriend. “Jesus didn’t have to deal with all this,” I said. “He didn’t have to deal with any drones over the Sea of Galilee.” “Well, I guarantee you there are drones over the Sea of Galilee at this very moment,” she said, a bit smugly. “Because they’re everywhere. And it’ll be this way forever.” And she was right, of course. The war was everywhere, all the time, invisible but constant, and its position overhead had cut us off from all that was beyond it, from the stars, from the universe, and possibly even from God. I imagined our prayers—mine, Sarah’s, everyone’s—as scraps of paper shredded in the high atmosphere and falling back to earth like pitiful confetti. Cecil fired the gun, and we clapped our hands over our ears. Then he fired it a second time. All of us were looking up at the sky, even Edina, who’d come back outside and was now kneeling down beside her house, wearing her headsock. This is an Alert, the voice shouted. This is an Alert, the voice beseeched. Repent, the voice seemed to scream. Treat each other better! While there’s still time! “Let me see it,” Neal said, holding his hand out for the gun. Cecil happily gave it to him. I’d never seen my husband fire anything but his hunting rifle. He stuck his arm up and out as though the handgun were a piece of high fruit that he was picking from a tree, as if hoping to shorten the distance between the bullet and the sky. He lowered it again, finger still on the trigger. “What if we hit one of ours?” “None of them are ours, per se. Not anymore,” Cecil said emphatically, scratching his chest hair. “We lost control of them months ago. They’re A.I.—artificial intelligence. They’ve evolved to the point where they no longer need us. They’re operating on their own now. They’ve got their own agenda.” I’d heard this theory before—on certain talk-radio shows, but never on any reputable news outlet. I couldn’t tell if Cecil really believed it or not. If the drones had their own agenda, I wanted to ask, then why weren’t we all dead already? “Please, don’t—” Edina shouted. “Please.” The Alert ended, though my ears continued to ring. Yoda stopped yapping and charged into the shrubs. We stood there for a few seconds adjusting to the silence, or to what felt like silence in the absence of the Alert: birds singing, leaves rustling, the low hum of the pool pump, a distant lawnmower revving back to life. “I think that about does it,” Neal said. Slowly, we got dressed and filed back into the house to cool off in the air-conditioning. Cecil locked the gun in his car. From the bathroom doorway, I watched Sarah wash the tanning oil off her arms. I’d decided I was going to love her harder. I was going to find her a new boyfriend. “Let’s have Marcus over to the house for dinner,” I said. “You mean it?” she asked. “Sure,” I said. “And don’t feel like you have to hide it from me when you’re praying.” “I’ve never hidden it.” “You know what I mean.” We went into the kitchen to help with the rest of the dishes and pots and pans. Mira poured some water in a coffee mug for Yoda. When the dog peed on the linoleum, she popped him on the rear end and sent him scampering into the den, where Cecil and Neal were setting up a game of checkers. Then Mira arranged a dry square of paper towel over the pee puddle and left the room. I was ready to go home. The pool party was over. I gathered our masks into the duffel and set it down at Neal’s feet. “Few more minutes,” he said. Yoda jumped up onto the couch. He clawed at an afghan blanket and started yapping. “Shut up,” Mira said, and flicked him with her finger. “This dog is driving me crazy. He’s just not trained right.” “And whose fault is that?” Cecil asked her. The dog kept on yapping, even after Mira knocked him off the couch. He jumped up and down at her legs. “Stop scratching me!” she yelled. “I think something is wrong with him,” Sarah said. That’s when we heard it. I don’t exactly know how to describe it. A scissor-whistling or a whistle-scissoring, out in the back yard. Something chopped down through the pine-tree limbs and thudded against the roof. It bounced and rolled toward the back of the house. Neal rushed over to the window for a better look. “Everyone put your masks on,” he said, and we all did, even Cecil and Mira. Mira dug a tiny mask out of her purse and strapped it over Yoda’s snout. “What the hell was it?” Cecil asked. “Sounded like a chopper.” “I can’t see anything,” Neal said. Cecil opened the back door and stepped onto the porch. Stupidly or not, we all followed him. He led us down the wooden steps and into the yard. I was still wrapped in my towel. I motioned for Sarah to stay behind me. The soil was soft, and the object had left a messy divot in the earth where it had touched down. It wasn’t a Snake or a Sweeper; those I would have recognized from television. It wasn’t shaped like any craft we recognized. It was a small glass cylinder, like one of the cannisters you put your checks into for the teller at the bank drive-through, only this one had a metal cone, and at the top of the cone were three long plastic blades, one of which had snapped in half. The blades were still trying to rotate, and weakly rocked the cannister back and forth in the dirt. “What if it’s a bomb?” Edina yelled. “We should all be running, shouldn’t we?” Cecil leaned down and picked it up with both hands. The blades started turning again with a rattled, ratcheting sound. It looked as if it were trying to escape his grip. We studied it, this thing from the sky. The glass—if that’s what it was—had cracked on one side. Without saying a word, Cecil marched it over to the pool and dropped it in the water. “Why’d you do that?” Mira yelled through her mask, which, I now noticed, had pink bedazzled eyebrows over the goggles. Cecil was very quiet. He wiped his hands across his bathing suit. The cannister had come to a rest at the bottom of the clear water that we’d been swimming in only thirty minutes earlier. We crowded around the pool to watch it. The blades stopped moving. After a few seconds, the cannister started to bubble from one end, where it was cracked, and we stepped back. Then a deep-reddish liquid swirled around it like blood. “Go,” Neal yelled. “Run!” We ran back up the stairs and into the house and slammed the door shut. Edina gave Cecil and Neal rolls of duct tape and they got to work sealing the doors and the windows. I called the phone number you’re supposed to call in these situations. Through my mask, I could barely hear the automated voice on the other end of the line, but slowly I realized: It was him, the voice from above. I couldn’t believe it. I pressed 1 For English and then 2 To Report a Crash and then 4 Possible Biological or Chemical Agent. His instructions for us were simple: we were to remain calm and to stay in the house and to keep our masks on until help arrived. I relayed this to the rest of the group and sat down on the couch. Cecil scrubbed his hands with soap and then Clorox in the kitchen sink. Neal turned off the air-conditioning and checked all the windows again. Mira put Yoda in her lap and rubbed his pink belly. He seemed to be having trouble breathing in his dog-size headsock. He scratched at it some. Sarah sat very still in the recliner. She may have been praying. I didn’t want to interrupt. I reached over and gave Edina’s arm a gentle squeeze, though whether this brought a smile or a frown to her face I couldn’t say, because of the mask. We didn’t know if we were going to live or die, if we’d been infected or exposed. For once, I was glad we were all together, as a family. Cecil, still shirtless, plopped down on the floor at my feet. Without thinking, I dabbled my fingertips across his neck. He let me do this for a full five seconds before twisting around to smile. “That was some quick thinking out there, Cecil,” I said, as a way of maybe explaining the physical contact, pulling away my hand. “Not sure it’ll do much, but thanks,” he said. He patted my bare foot a few times before letting his hand come to rest there. I slid my foot loose and crossed my legs. “We’ll be fine,” Neal said, confidently, striding back into the room. “Yoda’s shivering,” Mira said. “Doggy in the coal mine,” Cecil muttered. “He’s probably picking up on our energy,” Sarah said. “Dogs can do that.” “He’s got a bad heart,” Mira said. “The vet says it’ll probably be his heart that kills him.” “It looked so low-tech,” Neal said, about the machine. “I always expected something much more advanced.” “I don’t think it worked like it was supposed to,” Cecil said. “I think it malfunctioned.” “What I don’t get,” Edina said, “is where was the Alert?” We all turned to her, so small on the couch, hunched forward, her hands in her lap. “Huh?” Neal asked. “When that thing came down in the yard,” she said, “shouldn’t there have been an Alert?” Nobody said anything for a moment. “But wasn’t there?” Cecil asked. Edina shook her head back and forth. “I’m pretty sure I heard it,” Cecil said. “No,” I said. “She’s right. There wasn’t one.” We’d been too busy and panicked to realize it, but we’d had no warning at all. We’d been entirely on our own. Maybe we still were. “Marcus says when—” Sarah began. I shook my head. “Honey, please, not right now.” The clock on the mantel chimed three times. That morning, Neal had promised me we’d be home by three. Mira let Yoda down onto the floor, and he promptly rolled over onto his back, legs pointed at the ceiling fan. Cecil started setting up a new game of checkers. “You got any leftovers?” he asked his mother. “I’m absolutely starving.” “I could eat,” Mira agreed, through her mask. “Me, too,” Neal said, through his. I’d brought along a dessert, a store-bought peach cobbler, which I’d deposited in Edina’s fridge and forgotten. I started to rise from the couch but then sat back down. How were we going to eat the cobbler through the headsocks? To demonstrate the problem, I mimed eating a forkful of something, the imaginary fork knocking my mask’s large filter. “Well, shit,” Cecil said. Yoda was still on his back and had gone very still. Mira moved to the floor and scooted toward her dog. “I need to brush him so bad,” she said. “He smells like pee.” He was such a silly-looking creature, a white mop in a dark mask, the straps compressing his curly fur. His paws began to wave at us, all four paws, as if he were politely bidding us farewell. If he died, it seemed likely that we’d all be on the floor with him before long. We watched the movement in his paws travel down the crooked columns of his legs toward his belly, becoming more and more spastic. He was jerking wildly now. These were worrisome, twitchy kicks. These were the paroxysms of a dying animal. Unless, of course, they weren’t. Unless, of course, he was fine. Unless the poor thing had only fallen asleep, chased forever through a dog dream.

I know what you will do when morning comes. I wake before you do and I lie still. Sometimes I doze, but usually I am alert, with my eyes open. I don’t move. I don’t want to disturb you. I can hear your soft, calm breathing and I like that. And then at a certain point you turn toward me without opening your eyes; your hand reaches over, and you touch my shoulder or my back. And then all of you comes close to me. It is as though you were still sleeping—there is no sound from you, just a need, almost urgent but unconscious, to be close to someone. This is how the day begins when you are with me. It is strange how much unwitting effort it has taken to bring us here. The engineers and software designers could never have guessed, as they laid out their strategies and sought investment, that the thing they were making—the Internet—would cause two strangers to meet and then, after a time, to lie in the half-light of morning, holding each other. Were it not for them, we would never have been together in this place. One day you ask me if I hate the British, and I say that I do not. All that is over now. It is easy to be Irish these days. Easier maybe than being Jewish and knowing, as you do, that your great-aunts and uncles perished at Hitler’s hands. And that your grandparents, whom you love and visit sometimes out on Long Island, lost their brothers and sisters; they live with that catastrophe day in, day out. It is a pity that there is such great German music, you say, and I tell you that Germany comes in many guises, and you shrug and say, “Not for us.” We are in New York, on the Upper West Side, and when I open the blinds in the bedroom we can see the river and the George Washington Bridge. You don’t know, because I will never tell you, how much it frightens me that the bridge is so close and in full view. You know more about music than I do, but I have read books that you have not read. I hope that you will never stumble on a copy of James Baldwin’s “Another Country”; I hope that I will never come into the room and find you reading it, following Rufus through New York to his final journey up this way, on the train, to the bridge, the jump, the water. There is a year missing in your stories of your life, and this makes everyone who loves you watch you with care. I have asked you about it a few times and seen your hunched shoulders and your vague, empty look, the nerdy look that you have when you are low. I know your parents dislike the fact that I am older than you, but the knowledge that I don’t drink alcohol or take drugs almost makes up for that, or I like to think it does. You don’t drink or take drugs, either, but you do go outside to smoke, and maybe I should take up smoking, too, so that I can watch over you casually when you are out there and not have to wait and then feel relief when I hear the doors of the elevator opening and your key in the lock. There is no year in my life that I cannot account for, but there are years that I do not think about now, years that went by slowly, in a sort of coiled pain. I have never bothered you with the details. You think I am strong because I am older, and maybe that is the way things should be. I am old enough to remember when things were different. But no one cares now, in this apartment building or in the world outside, that we are men and we wake often in the same bed. No one cares now that when we touch each other’s face we find that we both need to shave. Or that when I touch your body I find a body like mine, though in better shape and twenty and more years younger. You are circumcised and I am not. That is a difference. We are cut and uncut, as they say in this country where we both live now, where you were born. Germany, Ireland, the Internet, gay rights, Judaism, Catholicism: they have all brought us here. To this room, to this bed in America. How easy it would have been for this never to have happened. How unlikely it would have seemed in the past. I feel happy, rested, ready for the day as I return from the shower and find you lying on your back with your glasses on, your hands behind your head. “You know that you were groaning in the night? Almost crying. Saying things.” Your voice is accusing; there is a quaver in it. “I don’t remember anything. That’s funny. Was it loud?” “It was loud. Not all the time, but just before the end it was loud, and you were waving your hands around. I moved over to you and whispered to you, and then you fell back asleep. You were all right then.” “When you whispered to me, what did you say?” “I said that it was all O.K., that there was nothing wrong. Something like that.” “I hope I didn’t keep you awake.” “It was no problem. I went back to sleep. I don’t know what you were dreaming about, but it wasn’t good.” The fear comes on Saturdays, and it comes, too, if I am staying somewhere, in a hotel room, for example, and there is shouting in the street in the night. Shouting under my window. I keep it to myself, the fear, and by doing this sometimes I keep it away, at arm’s length, elsewhere. But there are other times when it breaks through, something close to dread, as though what happened had not occurred yet but will occur, is about to do so, and there is nothing I can do to stop it. The fear can come from nowhere. I may be reading, as I often do on Saturdays while you practice or go to a concert with your friends. I am reading and then suddenly I look up, disturbed. The fear enters the pit of my stomach and the base of my neck like pain, and it seems as if nothing could lift it. Eventually, as it came, it will go, though not easily. Sometimes a sigh, or a walk to the fridge, or making myself busy putting clothes or papers away, will rid me of it, but it is always hard to tell what will work. The fear could stay for a while, or come back as though it had forgotten something. It is not under my control. I know where I was and what I was doing when my brother died. I was in Brighton, in England, and I was in bed and I could not sleep, because there were drunken crowds shouting below my hotel window. Sometime between two and three in the morning he died, in his own house in Dublin. He was alone there that night. If I had been sleeping at the moment when it happened, I might have woken, or at least stirred in the night. But probably not. Probably I would just have gone on sleeping. He died. That is the most important thing to say. My brother was in his own house in Dublin. He was alone. It was a Saturday night, Sunday morning. He called for an ambulance before two in the morning. When it arrived, he was dead, and the paramedics could not bring him back to life. I have never told anyone that I was awake in that room in Brighton in those hours. It hardly matters. It matters only to me and only at times. On one of those winter evenings when you are staying here, we go to bed early. Like a good American, you wear a T-shirt and boxers in bed. I am wearing pajamas, like a good Irishman. Chet Baker is on low. We are both reading, but I know you are restless. Because you are young, I always suspect that you are horny when I am not, and that is a joke between us. But it is probably true; it would make sense. In any case, you move toward me. I have learned always to pay attention when this happens, never to seem distracted or tired or bored. As we lie together, you whisper. “I told my analyst about you.” “What about me?” “About your crying in the night and my coming home on Saturday to find you looking so frightened or sad or something that you could barely talk.” “You didn’t say anything about it on Saturday. Was it this Saturday?” “Yeah, it was Saturday. I didn’t want to raise the subject.” “What did he say?” “He says that you have to do something about it. I told him you said that Irish people don’t go to analysts.” “What did he say?” “He said that explains why there are so many bad Irish novels and plays.” “There are some good Irish plays.” “Honey, I know I agreed to an open marriage, but maybe we could close it just a smidge.”Buy the print » “He doesn’t think so.” We lie there listening to Chet Baker singing “Almost Blue,” and I move to kiss you. You prop yourself up on your elbow and look at me. “He says that you have to get help but it has to be Irish help, only an Irish analyst could make sense of you. I told him that you didn’t hate the British, and maybe you could get, like, a British one, and he said it sounded like you needed help even more urgently than he’d thought.” “Do you pay him for this rubbish?” “My dad pays him.” “He sounds like a bundle of laughs, your shrink.” “He told me not to listen to you. Just to make you do it. I said that you were O.K. most of the time. But I’ve told him that before. Hey, he likes the sound of you.” “Fuck him!” “He’s good, he’s nice, he’s smart. And he’s straight, so you don’t have to worry about him.” “That’s true. I don’t have to worry about him.” Spring comes, and something that I had forgotten about begins. Behind this apartment building is an alley, or an opening between two buildings, and if it is warm at night some students gather there, maybe the ones who smoke. Sometimes I hear them and the sound becomes part of the night, like the noise the radiators make, until it fades. It has never bothered me in all the time I have lived here, and I have no memory of your ever remarking on it. It is quiet here, quiet compared with downtown or the apartment you share in Williamsburg on the nights when you do not stay with me. Nonetheless, I should have known that some night that noise would find me in my sleep. Maybe if I had got an Irish shrink, as your shrink suggested, he would have warned me about this, or I would have come to warn myself after many meetings with him. I don’t remember how it begins, but you do. I am whimpering in my sleep, or so you say, and then going quiet for a while. And then when there is more shouting in the alley behind the building I start to shiver. You say that it is more like someone shuddering, recoiling in fright, but still I have no memory of this. When you try and fail to wake me, you become afraid. I know that everything you do, the way you manage your day, is driven by your need never to become afraid. When I finally wake, you are on your cell phone and you look frightened. You tell me what happened and then you reach for your shirt. “I’m going.” “What’s wrong?” “I’ll talk to you in the morning. I’m going to get a cab.” “A cab?” “Yeah, I have money.” I watch you dress. You are silent and deliberate. Suddenly, you seem much older. In the light from the lamp on your side of the bed I can see what you will look like in the future. You turn as you go out the door. “I’ll text.” Within a minute you are gone. It is three-forty-five when I look at the clock. When I text and say that I am sorry for waking you, you do not reply. The next evening you come over. I can tell that you have something to say. You ignore me when I ask if you have eaten. “Hey, I’m going to take my clothes and stuff.” “I’m sorry about last night.” “You scared me. There’s something wrong with you. I don’t know what it is, but it’s too much for me.” “You don’t want to stay here again?” “Hey, I never said that. That is not what I said.” You sigh and sit down. I start to talk. “Maybe we should—” “No, no ‘maybe,’ and no ‘we should.’ You have to go and see someone. You can’t do this on your own, and I can’t help you, and I’m not staying here again until you’ve done that. It’s not because I don’t want to, but it’s weird. It wasn’t just once, just one bad dream. It’s intense. You should hear it. I thought I should record it on my phone for you, so you would know.” I imagine you holding the phone out in the dark with the record button on while I am having a bad dream I can’t wake from. “Why don’t we talk during the week?” “Sure.” You go to the bedroom and after some minutes reappear with a bag. “Are you certain you want to take your stuff?” “Yeah.” You have already taken the keys to this apartment off your key ring and you put them on the hall table. We hug and you leave with your head down. I stand with my back to the door and my eyes closed as I hear the elevator arrive and open its doors for you. And all I can think is that I would never have done this to you, walked out like that. And all I can think then is that maybe that’s what’s wrong with me. You have learned something that I don’t want to know. There is always that sense of being released when the plane takes off from J.F.K. to Dublin. Every Irish person who gets on that plane knows the feeling; some, like me, also know that it does not last for long. I read a bit and then sleep and then wake up and look around and go to the bathroom and notice that most of the other passengers are sleeping. But I don’t think I will sleep again. I don’t want to read. There are almost four hours still to go. I doze and wake and then fall into the deepest sleep in the hour before we land, so that I have to be woken and told to put my seat in the upright position. There is a hotel on St. Stephen’s Green, on the opposite side from the Shelbourne, and I have booked a room there for four nights. I have told no one that I am coming here, except the doctor, a psychiatrist, whom I met years ago, when he helped a friend of mine who was suffering from depression and could not sleep and could not handle anything. The doctor knew my friend’s family. I remember the time he spent with my friend and how he came back again and again. His kindness, his patience, his watchfulness. I remember that I made him tea on a few of those nights, and we spoke about the late Beethoven quartets and he told me which recordings he favored, as my friend lay next door in a darkened room. I remember that he liked jazz and that he found it strange that I did not. Until I met you, that is. I liked listening to jazz with you. When I called him from New York, he remembered that time and mentioned also that he had read a few of my books. He said that he would see me, but it would be best not to do it when I was jet-lagged. He told me to take a few days between landing in Dublin and the appointment. He was living alone now, he said, so he could see me at his house. He gave me the address, and we agreed on the time. When I asked about payment, he told me I could send him some jazz CDs from New York or my next book. In Dublin, I keep to the side streets on the first day. I go to the cinema in the afternoon and then up into Rathmines and find a few places to linger, where I think I will meet no one I know. The city seems low-key, almost calm. There is a new cinema in Smithfield and I go there on the second day and see two films in a row. I find a place to eat nearby. I notice how crowded it becomes, and how loud the voices are, how much laughing and shouting there is. I think about the city I used to know, which was a place that specialized in the half-said thing, the shrug, a place where people looked at one another out of the corner of their eye. All that is over now, or at least in Smithfield it is. I try not to sleep during the daytime on either of those days, although I want to. I go to Hodges Figgis and Books Upstairs and buy some books. In the evening, I watch the Irish news and some current-affairs programs on the television in my hotel room. “These are magic beans, my boy. Their value comes from growth and scale, not revenue.”Buy the print » And then on the third day, in the late afternoon, I go to Ranelagh to see the psychiatrist. I am unsure what we will say or do. I am scheduled to go back to New York the following day. Maybe there is a drug for what is wrong with me, but I doubt it. I need him to listen to me, or maybe I just need to be able to tell you when I come back that I have done this. Maybe, I think, he will refer me to someone in New York whom I can see in the same regular way that you see your analyst, as you call him. There is a long room that was once two rooms, and it is beautifully furnished. We take our shoes off and sit opposite each other on armchairs toward the back of that room. I realize that he does not need me to talk; he listened carefully to what I said on the phone. He asks me if I have ever been hypnotized, and I say no. There was a guy, I remember, who used to do it on television or in the theatre. I can’t recall his name—Paul something—but I have seen him on television once or twice. I think of hypnosis as a party game, or something that happens in black-and-white films. I did not expect the psychiatrist to suggest it as something he might do with me. He is, he says, going to use hypnosis. We will both need to be quiet. It would be best if I closed my eyes, he says. I think for a second that I should ask him why he is doing this, or whether he does it all the time, or what it could achieve, but there is something about the calm way that he approaches the task, something deliberate, that makes me feel that it is better not to ask anything. I am still wary and I am sure he notices this, but it does not deter him. I close my eyes. He leaves silence. I don’t know for how long he leaves silence. And then in a new voice, a voice that is more than a whisper but still has an undertow of whispering, he tells me that he is going to count to ten, and at the word “ten” I will be asleep. I nod and he begins. His voice has a softness but also an authority. I wonder if he has trained in hypnosis or if he developed his method on his own with other patients. When he gets to “ten,” there is no great change. But I do not move or tell him that I am still awake. I keep my eyes closed, trying to guess how long it will be before he realizes that the spell has not worked, that I am not asleep, that I still know where I am. “I want you to think about your brother.” “I’m getting nothing.” “I want you to take your time.” I leave my mind empty and my eyes closed. Nothing is happening, but there is a density to the feelings I am having, although the feelings themselves are ordinary ones. I am oddly relaxed and also uneasy. It is like a moment from childhood, or even adulthood, in which I am able to stop worrying about a pressing matter for a moment in the full knowledge that the worry will come back. During this interlude I do not move or speak. “I want you to think about your brother,” he says again. I let out a small moan, a sort of cry, but there is no emotion behind it. It is as if I were just doing what he expects me to do. “Nothing, nothing,” I whisper. “Follow it now.” “There’s nothing.” He leaves silence, leaves space for me to moan and tell him where I am going, but I am not sure where that is. It seems like nowhere in particular. I am moving. I am also awake. He speaks several times more, his voice softer and more insistent. And then I stop him. I need silence now and he leaves silence again. I sigh. I am puzzled. I cannot tell where I am going. I know that I am sitting in an armchair in a house in Ranelagh and that I can open my eyes at any moment. I know that I am going back to New York tomorrow. And then it comes, the hallway, and it is a precise hallway in a house I have known but never lived in. There is lino on the floor and a hall table and a door to a living room, the door slightly ajar. There are stairs at the end of the hallway. And then there is no “I.” I am a “he.” I am not myself. “Do you feel sad about your brother?” the psychiatrist asks. “No. No.” I am lying on the floor of that hallway. I am dying. I have called an ambulance and left the front door on the latch. The dying comes as lightness, a growing lightness, as though something were leaving me, and I am letting it leave, and then I am panicking, or almost panicking, and then feeling tired. “Follow how you feel.” I signal for him not to speak again. The idea that there is less of me now, and that this lessness will go on and there will be even less of me soon, that this diminishment will continue, is centered in my chest. Something is going down, going out, with a strange and persistent ease. There is no pain, more a mild pressure within the self, or the self that I am now, in this hallway, this room. It is happening within the body as much as within the self that can think or remember. Something is reaching out to death, but it is not death; “death” is too simple a word. It is closer to an emptying out of strain, until all that is left is nothing—not peace or anything like that, just nothing. This is coming gradually and inevitably. I, we, are smiling, or seem to be content and have no concerns. It is almost pleasure, but not exactly pleasure, and not exactly the absence of pain, either. It is nothing, and the nothing comes with no force, just a desire or a need, which seems natural, to allow things to proceed, not to get in their way. I think then that the experience is ending, and before it does I want to know if our mother is close now, but that comes as a question only. I see her face, but I do not feel her presence. I hold the thought and find myself longing for some completion of it, some further satisfying image, but nothing comes. Instead, there is stillness, and then the sound of the door being pushed open and voices. I can hear their urgency, but it is like urgency in a film that I cannot fully see; it is not real. It is in the background as I am lifted, as my chest is pushed and pummelled, as more voices are raised, as I am moved. Then there is nothing, really nothing—the nothing that I am and the nothing that is in this room now. Whatever has happened, it has ended. There is nowhere else to go. I begin to moan again, and then I am quiet and stay quiet until the psychiatrist says softly that he will count to ten again, and when he says the word “ten” I will come back from where I have been and I will be in the room with him. “I don’t know where you were, but I left you there.” I do not reply. “Maybe you got something you can work on.” “I became him.” “Did you feel sad?” “I was him. I wasn’t me.” He looks at me calmly. “Maybe the feelings will come now.” “I became him.” We do not speak for a while. When I look at my watch I think that I am misreading it. The watch says that two hours have passed. It is almost dark outside. He makes tea and puts on some music. When I find my shoes, I discover that I have trouble putting them on, as if my feet had swelled during the time that I was elsewhere. Eventually, I stand up and prepare to leave. He gives me a number I can call in a few weeks when I have absorbed what happened. “What did happen?” I ask. “I don’t know. You are the one who has to do the work.” He follows me in his stocking feet to the front door. We shake hands, and I leave. I walk through Dublin, from Ranelagh to St. Stephen’s Green, passing people on their way home from work. It is winter in New York and I have not replied to your texts. They come more sporadically and say less and less. It is down to “Hey!” or “Hi” and soon, I think, they will stop. When I go to Lincoln Center to see a film or hear music, I look at the list of upcoming concerts and check to see if your name is there. It would not surprise me on one of those nights if I found you standing close by, looking at me. I wake alone now. I wake early and lie thinking or dozing. In the morning, I carry the full burden of the night’s sleep. It is as if I had been tiring myself out in the darkness, rather than resting. There is no one to tell me if I make a sound as I sleep. I don’t know if I snore, or whimper, or cry out. I like to think that I am silent, but how can I tell?

It was 1972 and Sid Baumwell was hungry. For the salt at the bottom of the pretzel dish, for frozen Mars bars, for appreciation from someone who wasn’t a blood relation—preferably a girl with pink cheeks and big sleepy eyes, like the one in “The Graduate,” his second-favorite movie of all time. He could do two dozen pull-ups. No acne. He wasn’t truly handsome but not bad-looking—handsome enough, he felt, to deserve his hunger. Freckles across the bridge of his nose, slightly splayed feet, respectable height. Smart. He knew this. His teachers told him so when they pulled him aside to say that he wasn’t working up to his potential. He had potential, and this mattered more than grades, comforted him more than any A. He held a secret belief that he could, if he really really really wanted to, become President, but he didn’t want to, enjoyed his personal freedoms too much—in any case, politicians were chumps. He told himself that as the eldest of three he was sort of like the president of the siblings, though he knew he was too passive, conflict-averse, not enough righteous fury. His sister, Robin, had got all the fury. “Dickweed,” she hissed. For six months she had referred to him only as Jack Squat, which didn’t seem so mean until you saw her raging eyes. Even then, Sid’s response had been to shrug and walk away. When his brother took a Mars bar from the freezer, Sid’s Mars bar, what did Sid do? He let it go. Faced with his brother’s saucer eyes and defective right hand, the chocolate ring around his pale mouth, Sid never found the strength to do anything but shrug. So, right. He’d be an un-American President, anyway, too much compassion for the retarded and the lame. His mother called him “baby boy” or “Teddy beary.” “Shut up, Ma!” he never said, though he was beginning to suspect that he should. A legitimate red-blooded sixteen-year-old boy needed a grievance. Where was his pride? Where! But he never got around to it, and anyhow his mom loved him so much. At the grocery store one day, picking up milk and powdered doughnuts and three cans of creamed corn, he saw a card table set up near the register. A man in a dark suit stood behind the table—slicked-back hair, broad shoulders, smiling at Sid as if they were old friends. The man said, “Feel like a winner today, son?” Sid thought about it. “Maybe?” “No maybe about it. Maybe gives the gods a chance to pass you by.” “I feel like a winner,” Sid said. The man extended a hand. This was at a point in Sid’s life when he was still flattered when an older man shook his hand, flattered by a handshake so hard it hurt. This handshake went on for a beat too long, but Sid didn’t know that. The handshake felt respectful; respect was also something Sid was hungry for. The man said that his name was Bill Baxter, that he was a representative of a regional company that sold aluminum foil, waxed paper, and other fine products that make this hard life easier. He was travelling the area, distributing samples and hosting raffles in grocery stores. Would Sid be interested in a lifetime’s supply of aluminum foil? “We’re trying to compete with the national brand,” Bill said. “The national brand which shall go nameless.” “Reynolds?” “It shall go nameless,” he repeated, winking. He looked a bit like a spy. Men who even slightly resembled James Bond, who could pass for civilians but had an air of regal deviousness about them, men whose hair coöperated, impressed Sid terribly. And yes he wanted a lifetime’s supply of aluminum foil. That sort of thing would win his mother’s admiration and soothe his father’s financial anxieties—and so Sid wrote his name and phone number on an orange raffle ticket. He dropped the ticket in a fishbowl, already full of orange tickets, and realized that chances were slim he’d win. He said, “I won’t win.” Bill showed big white teeth. Capillaries branched across his cheeks like fine lace. He said, “Never know, right? The future’s a mystery.” He produced a wooden spoon from his suit jacket and stirred the contents of the fishbowl. Then he blew on the spoon and pretended to taste it, wincing in pain as if he’d burned his mouth. Sid laughed. Bill seemed to take pleasure in Sid’s laugh; a flush obliterated the capillaries. “You go to school?” Bill asked, returning the spoon to his suit jacket. But before Sid could answer he said, “Sure you do. Sure thing. You should stay in school, earn good grades, study hard, it’s all true.” He leaned in closer and, in a tight whisper, like a private message from 007 himself, said, “But T. and A., that’s what makes a life.” Sid stepped back. “What?” Bill smiled gamely. “Study hard, son,” he said. “And wash behind your ears.” Those letters played in Sid’s head on the walk home. When you stuck them together like that, T. and A., he couldn’t help picturing a girl in a disembodied way, just those parts floating in the air, a serial-killer fantasy. So he tried to supply a face. Whose face? Marley Grey’s. He pictured Marley’s dimples, her sly smile, the fingerprint-size mole at her right temple, that whirly smudge which since kindergarten he was sure meant she’d been touched by a higher power. And though it was true that since kindergarten he’d been three-quarters atheist, the other quarter saw Marley’s face and believed. He put her face above the T. and the A. No. Now she was disjointed—head, breasts, buttocks—like a swaying string puppet. He walked home faster, rearranging his thoughts. His mother was making beef stew and creamed corn tonight. He was DISHES on the chore wheel this week. That meant that his sister was GARBAGE and would complain that it was dangerous for her to go outside alone at night and he’d end up lugging the trash to the curb. Dangerous! There was zero danger here. His mean, unattractive sister fantasized about rapists, but no man paid her any attention at all. So what did Sid do? Feel sorry for her. Take out the trash. Where was his fury when he needed it? Where! As he was crossing McGovern, a car slowed beside him. It was Bill Baxter, rolling down a window. “Need a lift?” he sang. “I’m not far from home, I guess,” Sid called back. Warnings flashed through his head, though those men wore clown costumes or at least sunglasses. Bill said, “Hop in! I need the company. Anyway, looks like it might rain.” And it was true—the sky was turning a bruisy green-gray, an ozone charge in the air—so Sid got in. The car was immaculate, a plush maroon interior free of debris, windows spotless. It smelled like peppermint. A blue-and-yellow candy cane hung from the rearview mirror. It couldn’t have been further from Sid’s family’s car, that crumb-filled, gas-stinking station wagon with its roped-on muffler. “Nice car,” Sid said. Bill gave a heard-it-all laugh. “This heap? This belonged to my old lady. Once it was my old lady’s mama’s. Those two. You get caught in the crossfire of their chatter, you long for unconsciousness. Where am I taking you?” Sid explained how to get to his street. They passed the cemetery and the Sweets-N-Freeze and the vet where his cat got put to sleep after she was hit by a sanitation truck. Sid felt obliged to fill the silence—Bill was a guest in his town, which wasn’t unlike having a guest in his home—so he said, “My cat got put to sleep right there.” “They kill your kitty at the ice-cream parlor?” “Next door. The vet.” Bill nodded, flexed and unflexed his hands on the wheel. “Right. Naturally. I don’t mean to jest.” Then, after a pause: “I’m not a cat person myself, but I know good people who are.” “No one is completely abominable.”Buy the print » All four of her legs had been broken. The vet, a woman with a faint mustache and a stack of clinking plastic bracelets on one arm, had taken his mother’s hand and said, “Do what’s right, Ma’am, that’s all you have to do.” “I’m not a cat person either,” Sid said. When it was put that way—“cat person”—it sounded creepy. He thought, Just that cat. Just Ponderosa. “It was mother-in-law’s, before she died. And my wife’s, before she took off with Sal the Salamander Bristol. Now it’s mine. Play your cards right, it could be yours!” “A cat?” “The car. I’m talking about this car now.” They passed the public library; they passed Louis Lombardo, fat and schizophrenic, wearing the uniform of the job he’d long since lost, still pruning the bushes at Town Hall. He was Loony Lou. He weeded and trimmed and sometimes left bouquets on the doorsteps of certain women who were way out of his league, including—Sid heard from kids at school—Marley’s mother. Lou worked with manic intensity, hurried from one patch of civic vegetation to another, park to library to school. No one paid him a cent, but supposedly his services allowed the city council to cut back on its landscaping budget. “You interested in cars?” Bill asked. “Sure,” Sid said, though it wasn’t quite true. He was interested in cars the way he was interested in “careers” or “marriage”—someday he’d partake, maybe, hopefully, but for now these categories had nothing to do with him. “Zero to sixty in half an hour,” Bill said. “All requests for acceleration must be submitted in writing. You get it? This car lacks power. I’d rather have a— No, I’d rather have nothing. This is the car that was preferred by my mother-in-law, and I take what I can get. You play your cards right, she could be yours. I’m in the process of letting go.” “It’s so clean,” Sid heard himself say. He touched the window, left a greasy print, wiped it with the sleeve of his shirt. “Clean? Certainly. The objects in a man’s life reflect his spirit.” Sid said, “What do you mean, if I play my cards right?” Bill was silent. Then he took a long, grave breath, like a swimmer before the dive, and said, “I’m making decisions about my life. I might start giving things away. I can’t decide if it’s better to be wed to nothing. Or if it’s better to collect, to defend yourself with things. The things you own own you. Who said that? I can’t remember. What do you think?” “I don’t own anything,” Sid said. The shelf above his bed held one participation trophy, a sea shell the size of his ear, and an unopened complete set of Topps baseball cards from the year of his birth. Somewhere in that shrink-wrapped box, an immaculate Ted Williams. Sid said, “I don’t own anything important.” “You like it that way?” He didn’t. He kept a list in his wallet of things he wanted: cowboy boots, an onyx fountain pen, an old-fashioned shaving kit with a boar-bristle brush, a new wallet. “I don’t know what I like yet,” Sid said. “Of course you do. What you like doesn’t come with age. It’s innate. How old are you, son?” “Sixteen.” “Experience is overrated. Who said that?” “I don’t know.” “I did! Just now! Aren’t you paying attention?” Sid laughed, but to be honest he was starting to feel uneasy. “Take a left here.” “I’m divorced.” Bill took the turn a little too fast. “Wife got a new life. I got the car. Good riddance.” “You been doing this long?” “Picking up kids? You’re the first, I promise.” “I meant the foil.” “I know what you meant. Long enough. I’ve been a salesman forever. Shoes first. Various chemical products. This is a sideline.” He ran a hand through his perfect hair. “Look, is it weird to say I see myself in you?” “I don’t know—a little?” Sid felt as if he were in a movie. The queasy-looking sky, the clean car, the forcefulness of Bill’s voice, the presence of Bill’s coöperative hair next to his own moppish cowlicky mess. It made him feel like there was a camera nearby. Bill said, “You’re a bright kid, I can tell. You’ve got an astute face. I’m good at reading faces. So can I ask: this town. How do you handle it?” “Handle it how?” “That’s what I’m asking. I can’t imagine growing up here. So small. So dim. Two days here feels like two weeks. I’m trying to figure out a place to go. I can go anywhere. Tell me why I should stay here. Make a case for this town. I want to be convinced of something. Convince me.” Sid said that he’d never lived anyplace else, so he couldn’t make a case for the town. As soon as he graduated from high school, he was leaving. “But it’s not a bad place. Not at all. People are nice.” “Nice is the kiss of death.” “I know what you mean.” “Sure you know. You’re sixteen but you’re no fool.” “Here,” Sid said. “My house.” Bill pulled over. They looked at it together: chalky blue shingles, faded shutters, metal watering can on the concrete stoop, scrappy hydrangea. “Home again home again,” Bill said, and sighed. “I see exactly how it feels.” Sid opened the passenger door. The spring air smelled rude, animal, after the crisp peppermint of the car. He hesitated a moment. He said, “How do you know how it feels?,” and heard a trace of defensiveness in his voice. “I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings, kid.” “You didn’t.” But why shouldn’t he feel defensive? This was his home, after all. He was born in this town’s two-story hospital, had been kept alive and well by its tater tots and crosswalks and elderly crossing guards. This town’s good-hearted teachers had urged his hand across so many cursive worksheets. It was for this town’s warm, metallic water that he’d learned to heave his tiny self onto giant water fountains. And yet in certain ways Sid couldn’t really see the town, could he? An outsider, a judgmental outsider, could tell him things. “You didn’t hurt my feelings,” he said, more forcefully. All at once, the windshield was covered with mist. Bill said, “Most people don’t have an appetite for truth, I’ve learned.” “The truth doesn’t bother me.” “No?” “Not to my knowledge.” “That’s very good to know.” Sid swallowed. “So how does it feel?” “How does what feel?” “This town.” “You want to know?” “I do.” “It feels . . .” Bill paused. The rain got stronger. “It feels like tomorrow won’t come fast enough. Like today’s some lazy bum with his feet on the coffee table, no intention of going anywhere ever at all. Like you could wave a stick of dynamite in today’s face and it wouldn’t even wince. Does that seem about right?” Sid said it did seem about right, yes. He hugged his grocery bag to his chest. He got out of the car. Bill flicked on his wipers, lifted a hand, was gone. The next evening, at dinnertime, the phone rang. His mother answered, crinkled her brow. People weren’t supposed to call at dinnertime. They were just about to sit down. The table was spread with five settings, a basket of six rolls, veal cutlets, peas, five glasses of milk. They all drank milk, even Sid’s dad. It was his mother’s one non-negotiable demand. For the past week they’d been using pink doily napkins left over from his sister’s birthday party. “For you,” his mother told Sid. “Joan? You know a Joan?” Sid shook his head. He picked up the phone in the living room. “Is this Sid?” “Yes, it is.” “I’m happy to report you’re the winner of a lifetime supply of aluminum foil.” “I am? Really? For real?” “You are—really. For real.” She seemed irritated. Then: “Wait, who is this?” “My name is Joan.” “Bill . . .” “I’m the secretary.” He was disappointed. “I won?” he said again. “Really? That’s great!” “How old are you, Sid?” “Sixteen . . . Is that O.K.? I don’t need to be an adult to win, do I?” Buy the print » “I suppose not.” “Bill invited me to enter.” “That’s fine,” the woman said in a tired voice. “Don’t get all riled up.” A kind of pressure was mounting in his chest—a sense of victory. More than victory. A sense of triumph—as if this unlikely win (that fishbowl had been full) foretold other, bigger, more encompassing wins. “A truck will arrive on Saturday morning to deliver the aluminum foil. You will be available then to receive it?” He said he would be. He gave his address. His family had begun eating without him. He sat down, unfolded his napkin, and announced the news. His sister said flatly, derisively, “Holy shit, wow.” “Holy smokes,” his mother urged. And to Sid: “Where did you meet this man? He had a fishbowl?” “At Marvin’s. Near the register. The bowl was full of tickets.” “Fine print?” his father said. “No fine print.” Sid lifted his chest. “They’re delivering it Saturday.” “No fine print,” his mother said. She was beaming. “And we need that! Did you know it? Aluminum foil is on my grocery list!” Sid’s father, who was allowed certain curse words, who got two dinner rolls, said, “Hot damn, son.” Ricky pretended to be bored but was obviously jealous. Sid sensed his brother’s envy and said, “Lucky break, I guess,” because he was a good brother. His mother went to the kitchen, returned with a piece of paper that read pie stuff, detergent, alum foil, choco sprinkles, thyme. Across the top of the stationery were the words “Mother knows best,” in all caps, between two bunches of daffodils. The pad had been a gift from Sid on her previous birthday. With a stubby pencil, she drew a line through alum foil, then thrust the paper into Sid’s hand. “Keep that,” she said. He kept it. He kept it longer than he kept a lot of things. On Friday afternoon, Sid and his brother cleared a wall of the garage, dumped old magazines and rags and broken toys, dumped the mildewed hobby horse they’d ridden as kids, dumped half-empty motor-oil containers, paint cans. They worked for a couple of hours preparing for the arrival of aluminum foil. His mother, meanwhile, baked a lasagna; Sid understood that her intention was to praise him, after dinner, by covering the leftovers with a sheet of his bounty. On Saturday, the truck arrived, bearing the name of the regional manufacturer on its side. A man who was not Bill descended from the cab. “It’s here!” Sid called. His parents rushed to the door. The three of them stood on the front stoop. The deliveryman took a couple of steps onto the crabgrassy lawn. He read from a clipboard. “Sid . . . uh . . . Bomb-Wall?” “Bowem-well,” his father said, proudly, as if their name meant something, was not an Ellis Island concoction. “I’m Sid,” Sid said. “Me.” “Okeydoke,” the guy said. “It can go in the garage,” Sid said. The deliveryman went to the truck, opened the back, climbed inside, and emerged holding a small cardboard box. This he carried up the walkway and handed to Sid. Inside were eight rolls. That was it. A lifetime supply. Why had they imagined boxes and boxes? On the curb, mocking them, sat a pile of garbage bags full of the junk they’d cleared out of the garage. The delivery truck left. Still they stood on the stoop. “Well done,” his mother said. She tousled his hair. “Eight?” His father’s mouth got small, strained. “Cheap buggers.” His mother scowled. “Don’t do that! What do they say? About the gift horse?” She turned to Sid. “This was on my list,” she reminded him. He’d let them down. He felt like Bill was mocking him. Was Bill mocking him? His parents went back into the house, but Sid stayed on the stoop. Only now did he realize that Bill had picked his ticket on purpose. How could he have realized this only now? How had he failed to understand this right away? At dinner that night, he saw clearly the meagreness of their life. Those sad party napkins, the nicks in the wooden table, the cheapness of their clothes. His mother’s polyester top, its polka dots stretched weirdly over her weirdly big breasts. His whole life he would buy Reynolds, he decided. “Eat up!” his mother said. “First person to finish gets seconds.” All that remained of the lasagna was the crispy edge pieces. A few weeks later, as Sid walked home from school, the maroon car slowed down next to him. It wasn’t like Sid to get angry, let alone stay angry, and yet since the delivery he’d been nursing anger and abashedness in equal measure. Abashedness because what the hell was wrong? What could he complain about? Nothing! But anger, even so. For the smallness of the lifetime supply. For his father’s disappointment. For how sad it made him to see how readily his father would have been soothed by a great quantity of anything. Bill had done it on purpose. He seemed—in some essential way—like a con man. Sid was angry for those reasons. But also, if he was honest with himself, because he’d expected Bill to return. He’d expected him to call on the phone with congratulations, with the pretense of congratulations, in order to say more outrageous, electric things. And so when Sid saw Bill’s car he felt not anger but a flash of relief. Bill rolled down the window. “Cuppa joe? On me.” “I don’t drink joe,” Sid said. Inside the car, classical music was playing. The candy cane still hung from the rearview mirror. That candy cane wouldn’t have lasted a minute if this were Sid’s car. His appetite for sugar was legendary. Or maybe it was a different candy cane? Maybe Bill kept a bag in the glove compartment and replaced it continually? It would comfort Sid, somehow, to learn that Bill loved sugar, too. They drove down LeMay Street, green lights all the way. Bill said, “Coffee won’t stunt your growth if that’s what you’re worried about.” “I’m not worried.” “Old wives’ tale. I’ve been sucking at the java teat since I was—six? seven?” Sid said, “I’m not worried about my growth.” “You’re tall enough.” Bill’s voice was tight, almost mean. “And true stature is internal, anyhow.” “I don’t like the taste.” “You sound like a teen-ager. ‘Taste’ is teen-ager business. What do you like the taste of?” “Whiskey,” Sid said, and this cut the tension. Bill laughed; Sid laughed. Like a laugh between old friends, easy, warm, which in the next moment alarmed him, because why should they be friends? “Where do you want to go?” Bill asked. “No coffee, fine. I’d take you to a bar, but you’re just sixteen.” “I’m on my way home from school.” “Home’s no good. Home’s just the starting line.” “My mother’s expecting me. She’s making lamb chops.” “What’s the highest place in this town? Let’s go there?” The highest place wasn’t very high, a clearing on a hill from which you could see the light-bulb factory and a playground. When they got there, Bill turned off the car. The music stopped, which Sid regretted, yet he didn’t feel he had the right to ask Bill to turn it back on. “You picked my ticket,” Sid said. “Now, why would I do that?” Bill opened the glove compartment. No candy canes but a silver flask. He unscrewed the top, took a long sip, and offered it to Sid. Sid hesitated. “You and your friends drink in cars?” He didn’t have many friends. Just Chip and Lilo, sometimes Joshua, and they drank Kool-Aid and played Stratego in Lilo’s basement. They got drunk on nothing but humid, laundry-scented basement air and the occasional glimpse of Lilo’s mom’s cleavage and calves when she lumbered downstairs, laundry basket on one hip, toddler on the other. Sid said, “We don’t have cars.” “You want one?” “Who doesn’t?” “Drink,” Bill told him. Sid took the flask. He drank. “You won fair and square,” Bill said. “You have to accept that, son. You’re blessed like that. Can you accept that?” “Mom usually chews it up for us.”Buy the print » Blessed! The word stung him, thrilled him, and in this way felt exactly like the whiskey going down. For the rest of his life, every time he took a sip of whiskey, the word that would describe the sensation—that was the sensation—was “blessed.” “I know you picked it,” Sid said. “That’s not polite, son. Contradicting an elder.” “O.K., I won fair and square.” “That’s right.” New leaves on the trees, a wide open sky. Down on the playground, bands of children assaulted the swings. Their coats littered the perimeter. Bill’s hair was perfect. How did he get his hair so perfect? Sid felt the urge to ask what sort of grease he used in it, how he got his teeth so white. Bill came from a universe where men knew these things. Sid was ninety-nine-point-nine-per-cent sure that he himself would fail to find this universe, either because it didn’t exist anymore or because he’d get lost on the way—maybe, likely, both. His father had never found it. His father’s floppy, thinning hair was tamed by three swoops of an electric razor. His father would never know shaken or stirred. “I’m thinking about giving away my belongings,” Bill said. He tossed the flask back again, swallowed, exhaled through his teeth. “Let’s say I gave you a pair of silver cufflinks. What would you say to that?” “That I couldn’t accept.” “Your manners will be the death of you.” Sid took another sip. Blessed. Blessed. Down below, the children assembled for tug-of-war. “If I gave you a shirt with French cuffs and some silver cufflinks, would you wear them? Would you have the guts to wear them to school? I know how kids your age dress. No one has any pride. Would you wear a suit to school if I gave you a suit?” Sid decided that he would forgo his good manners, would be candid, that the novelty of the moment, their new altitude, gave him permission. He said, “I would never wear a suit to school.” It embarrassed Sid how ugly he must look to Bill, in his sweatshirt and ratty jeans, but to show up at school in a suit and cufflinks would be worse than death. He thought of Marley. Her whole alphabet body. She would laugh at him. “People would laugh at me.” “So?” “So I’d rather not get that kind of attention.” “You know a better kind?” “Of course.” Alan Desmarais, president of the student council three years running. The girls rushed him in the cafeteria. He had the biggest Adam’s apple of anyone at Monroe High, teachers included. Once, he’d winked at Sid when they passed in the hall. Pandering. Paternalistic. The kind of attention Alan got, the power it afforded him—he could taunt with only a wink. But there was a worse kind of attention also. Sid knew this. Like Ricky’s defect, his claw hand forever cupped at his side, as if to cradle a baby bird. Mitten it! Mitten it! For a period of time in elementary school, this had been the playground chant. And even then Sid, older by two years, hadn’t had the balls to beat up Oliver and Max and that lunatic Susan Kipper, whose boobs were bigger than her brain, even in fifth grade. She of all people should have been understanding about defects. He could do nothing but wait, helpless, dumb, the furthest thing from presidential. Where was his anger? Where! “I try to take the middle road,” Sid finally said. “Blend in.” “Blending is for cooks. Fear isn’t any way to conduct a life. You should wear a suit if it pleases you. Cufflinks, at least.” Bill’s voice was wise. It knew. To hold Bill’s cufflinks in his hand—just imagining their lightness in his palm—filled him with a desire to transcend his boyhood right now. Bill said, reading his mind, “You’re a special kid, Sid.” And then he unbuckled his seat belt. Sid felt a change in the air. A charge. It had never happened in his life, he had never once been kissed, and yet he felt with surety: he is going to kiss me. Bill is going to kiss me. Bill is going to kiss me. Bill didn’t move. Sid’s body thrummed. Deep shivery calm, like when his mother ran her long fingernails down his neck after she tried and failed to tame his hair. He was still, waited, but Bill didn’t kiss him. Instead, Bill said, “We’re after the perfect woman, you and me. Except she doesn’t exist. Or she does but she’s hiding. In the meantime, we make do. I want to give you some bookends. They’re made of amber. In the trunk. Don’t let me forget to give them to you. Promise you won’t forget?” Sid said, “I don’t need bookends.” “Someday you will. You’ll have a den full of books.” The shivery feeling lifted. He felt profoundly dumb. Why had he thought that this man would kiss him? What sort of lunatic was he? The word “homosexual” sputtered like a flame in his brain and, mercifully, went out. “The lifetime supply was only eight rolls,” Sid said. Bill sighed deeply. “You heard about the mouth of the gift horse, kid?” “I have.” “You’ll be lucky if you get through five before the Reaper comes, studies say.” Bill put his seat belt back on. He started up the car. The music resumed. On the way home they passed the Sweets-N-Freeze and Looney Lou spinning in the roses and a bunch of ill-dressed boys playing stickball. They passed many mothers pushing strollers. When they pulled up in front of Sid’s house, Bill said, “Maybe one day you’ll wake up and find this car in your driveway. I’ll be gone. You’ll find the keys in the ignition. One day. Maybe soon. Will you keep an eye out?” The bones in Bill’s face glowed in the late sunlight. He was handsome, like a magazine man. But close to an edge. What edge? The edge of what? He was not dangerous—Sid understood it now—but in danger. He was lost. “Will you keep an eye out?” Bill asked again, a touch of plaintiveness in his voice. Sid didn’t know what to say. What if the car showed up in the driveway? Would he get in it? Would he drive away? Could he? Was there a perfect girl hiding somewhere? He didn’t believe enough in anything, or only in doubt and in waiting—only those two things one hundred and ten per cent, and those were the worst things on earth. Inside, his mother was making her lamb chops. She called them her legendary lamb chops. What’s for dinner tonight, Ma? Legendary lamb chops. He felt so sorry for her, so grateful for her. He suppressed the reflex to invite Bill in to dinner. Instead, he said, “I’ll keep an eye out.” Bill nodded. It was time to go. “I’m sorry about the foil, kid.” He seemed to mean it. “I wish it were better. We get the prizes we deserve is what I’ve come to believe. You’ll win many more prizes in your life, big and little both. My days of prizes are over but yours aren’t, I guarantee that.” Sid kept an eye out. He would wake up every day and check the driveway for the car. Before peeing, before brushing his teeth—he would look outside. First. Sid looked down and saw that his hand was being touched by Bill’s hand. Bill’s long, cool fingers rested lightly on his own. He was filled with calm, alert curiosity. His impulse was to stay perfectly still, to freeze, like when a ladybug lands on your hand. Or not a ladybug—something weirder. A glowy beetle, an insect you’d never for a second believe lived in your ho-hum corner of the universe. But it does. It is showing you. Stay still. Do not move a muscle. That thing could have landed anywhere, on anything. The word for this is luck.

Jim Trusdale had a shack on the west side of his father’s gone-to-seed ranch, and that was where he was when Sheriff Barclay and half a dozen deputized townsmen found him, sitting in the one chair by the cold stove, wearing a dirty barn coat and reading an old issue of the Black Hills Pioneer by lantern light. Looking at it, anyway. Sheriff Barclay stood in the doorway, almost filling it up. He was holding his own lantern. “Come out of there, Jim, and do it with your hands up. I ain’t drawn my pistol and don’t want to.” Trusdale came out. He still had the newspaper in one of his raised hands. He stood there looking at the sheriff with his flat gray eyes. The sheriff looked back. So did the others, four on horseback and two on the seat of an old buckboard with “Hines Mortuary” printed on the side in faded yellow letters. “I notice you ain’t asked why we’re here,” Sheriff Barclay said. “Why are you here, Sheriff?” “Where is your hat, Jim?” Trusdale put the hand not holding the newspaper to his head as if to feel for his hat, which was a brown plainsman and not there. “In your place, is it?” the sheriff asked. A cold breeze kicked up, blowing the horses’ manes and flattening the grass in a wave that ran south. “No,” Trusdale said. “I don’t believe it is.” “Then where?” “I might have lost it.” “You need to get in the back of the wagon,” the sheriff said. “I don’t want to ride in no funeral hack,” Trusdale said. “That’s bad luck.” “You got bad luck all over,” one of the men said. “You’re painted in it. Get in.” Trusdale went to the back of the buckboard and climbed up. The breeze kicked again, harder, and he turned up the collar of his barn coat. The two men on the seat of the buckboard got down and stood either side of it. One drew his gun; the other did not. Trusdale knew their faces but not their names. They were town men. The sheriff and the other four went into his shack. One of them was Hines, the undertaker. They were in there for some time. They even opened the stove and dug through the ashes. At last they came out. “No hat,” Sheriff Barclay said. “And we would have seen it. That’s a damn big hat. Got anything to say about that?” “It’s too bad I lost it. My father gave it to me back when he was still right in the head.” “Where is it, then?” “Told you, I might have lost it. Or had it stoled. That might have happened, too. Say, I was going to bed right soon.” “Never mind going to bed. You were in town this afternoon, weren’t you?” “Sure he was,” one of the men said, mounting up again. “I seen him myself. Wearing that hat, too.” “Shut up, Dave,” Sheriff Barclay said. “Were you in town, Jim?” “Yes sir, I was,” Trusdale said. “In the Chuck-a-Luck?” “Yes sir, I was. I walked from here, and had two drinks, and then I walked home. I guess the Chuck-a-Luck’s where I lost my hat.” “That’s your story?” Trusdale looked up at the black November sky. “It’s the only story I got.” “Look at me, son.” Trusdale looked at him. “That’s your story?” “Told you, the only one I got,” Trusdale said, looking at him. Sheriff Barclay sighed. “All right, let’s go to town.” “Why?” “Because you’re arrested.” “Ain’t got a brain in his fuckin’ head,” one of the men remarked. “Makes his daddy look smart.” They went to town. It was four miles. Trusdale rode in the back of the mortuary wagon, shivering against the cold. Without turning around, the man holding the reins said, “Did you rape her as well as steal her dollar, you hound?” “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Trusdale said. The rest of the trip continued in silence except for the wind. In town, people lined the street. At first they were quiet. Then an old woman in a brown shawl ran after the funeral hack in a sort of limping hobble and spat at Trusdale. She missed, but there was a spatter of applause. At the jail, Sheriff Barclay helped Trusdale down from the wagon. The wind was brisk, and smelled of snow. Tumbleweeds blew straight down Main Street and toward the town water tower, where they piled up against a shakepole fence and rattled there. “Hang that baby killer!” a man shouted, and someone threw a rock. It flew past Trusdale’s head and clattered on the board sidewalk. Sheriff Barclay turned and held up his lantern and surveyed the crowd that had gathered in front of the mercantile. “Don’t do that,” he said. “Don’t act foolish. This is in hand.” The sheriff took Trusdale through his office, holding him by his upper arm, and into the jail. There were two cells. Barclay led Trusdale into the one on the left. There was a bunk and a stool and a waste bucket. Trusdale made to sit down on the stool, and Barclay said, “No. Just stand there.” The sheriff looked around and saw the possemen crowding into the doorway. “You all get out of here,” he said. “Otis,” the one named Dave said, “what if he attacks you?” “Then I will subdue him. I thank you for doing your duty, but now you need to scat.” When they were gone, Barclay said, “Take off that coat and give it to me.” Trusdale took off his barn coat and began shivering. Beneath he was wearing nothing but an undershirt and corduroy pants so worn the wale was almost gone and one knee was out. Sheriff Barclay went through the pockets of the coat and found a twist of tobacco in a page of an R.W. Sears Watch Company catalogue, and an old lottery ticket promising a payoff in pesos. There was also a black marble. “That’s my lucky marble,” Trusdale said. “I had it since I was a boy.” “Turn out your pants pockets.” Trusdale turned them out. He had a penny and three nickels and a folded-up news clipping about the Nevada silver rush that looked as old as the Mexican lottery ticket. “Take off your boots.” Trusdale took them off. Barclay felt inside them. There was a hole in one sole the size of a dime. “Now your stockings.” Barclay turned them inside out and tossed them aside. “Drop your pants.” “I don’t want to.” “No more than I want to see what’s in there, but drop them anyway.” Trusdale dropped his pants. He wasn’t wearing underdrawers. “Turn around and spread your cheeks.” Trusdale turned, grabbed his buttocks, and pulled them apart. Sheriff Barclay winced, sighed, and poked a finger into Trusdale’s anus. Trusdale groaned. Barclay removed his finger, wincing again at the soft pop, and wiped his finger on Trusdale’s undershirt. “Where is it, Jim?” “My hat?” “You think I went up your ass looking for your hat? Or through the ashes in your stove? Are you being smart?” Trusdale pulled up his trousers and buttoned them. Then he stood shivering and barefoot. An hour earlier he had been at home, reading his newspaper and thinking about starting a fire in the stove, but that seemed long ago. “I’ve got your hat in my office.” “Then why did you ask about it?” “To see what you’d say. That hat is all settled. What I really want to know is where you put the girl’s silver dollar. It’s not in your house, or your pockets, or up your ass. Did you get to feeling guilty and throw it away?” “I don’t know about no silver dollar. Can I have my hat back?” “No. It’s evidence. Jim Trusdale, I’m arresting you for the murder of Rebecca Cline. Do you have anything you want to say to that?” “Yes, sir. That I don’t know no Rebecca Cline.” The sheriff left the cell, closed the door, took a key from the wall, and locked it. The tumblers screeched as they turned. The cell mostly housed drunks and was rarely locked. He looked in at Trusdale and said, “I feel sorry for you, Jim. Hell ain’t too hot for a man who’d do such a thing.” “What thing?” The sheriff clumped away without any reply. Trusdale stayed there in the cell, eating grub from Mother’s Best, sleeping on the bunk, shitting and pissing in the bucket, which was emptied every two days. His father didn’t come to see him, because his father had gone foolish in his eighties, and was now being cared for by a couple of squaws, one Sioux and the other Cheyenne. Sometimes they stood on the porch of the deserted bunkhouse and sang hymns in harmony. His brother was in Nevada, hunting for silver. Sometimes children came and stood in the alley outside his cell, chanting, “Hangman, hangman, come on down.” Sometimes men stood out there and threatened to cut off his privates. Once, Rebecca Cline’s mother came and said she would hang him herself, were she allowed. “How could you kill my baby?” she asked through the barred window. “She was only ten years old, and ’twas her birthday.” “Ma’am,” Trusdale said, standing on the bunk so that he could look down at her upturned face. “I didn’t kill your baby nor no one.” Buy the print » “Black liar,” she said, and went away. Almost everyone in town attended the child’s funeral. The squaws went. Even the two whores who plied their trade in the Chuck-a-Luck went. Trusdale heard the singing from his cell, as he squatted over the bucket in the corner. Sheriff Barclay telegraphed Fort Pierre, and after a week or so the circuit-riding judge came. He was newly appointed and young for the job, a dandy with long blond hair down his back like Wild Bill Hickok. His name was Roger Mizell. He wore small round spectacles, and in both the Chuck-a-Luck and Mother’s Best proved himself a man with an eye for the ladies, although he wore a wedding band. There was no lawyer in town to serve as Trusdale’s defense, so Mizell called on George Andrews, owner of the mercantile, the hostelry, and the Good Rest Hotel. Andrews had got two years of higher education at a business school back East. He said he would serve as Trusdale’s attorney only if Mr. and Mrs. Cline agreed. “Then go see them,” Mizell said. He was in the barbershop, tilted back in the chair and taking a shave. “Don’t let the grass grow under your feet.” “Well,” Mr. Cline said, after Andrews had stated his business, “I got a question. If he doesn’t have someone to stand for him, can they still hang him?” “That would not be American justice,” Andrews said. “And although we are not one of the United States just yet, we will be soon.” “Can he wriggle out of it?” Mrs. Cline asked. “No, ma’am,” Andrews said. “I don’t see how.” “Then do your duty and God bless you,” Mrs. Cline said. The trial lasted through one November morning and halfway into the afternoon. It was held in the municipal hall, and on that day there were snow flurries as fine as wedding lace. Slate-gray clouds rolling toward town threatened a bigger storm. Roger Mizell, who had familiarized himself with the case, served as prosecuting attorney as well as judge. “Like a banker taking out a loan from himself and then paying himself interest,” one of the jurors was overheard to say during the lunch break at Mother’s Best, and although nobody disagreed with this, no one suggested that it was a bad idea. It had a certain economy, after all. Prosecutor Mizell called half a dozen witnesses, and Judge Mizell never objected once to his line of questioning. Mr. Cline testified first, and Sheriff Barclay came last. The story that emerged was a simple one. At noon on the day of Rebecca Cline’s murder, there had been a birthday party, with cake and ice cream. Several of Rebecca’s friends had attended. Around two o’clock, while the little girls were playing Pin the Tail on the Donkey and Musical Chairs, Jim Trusdale entered the Chuck-a-Luck and ordered a knock of whiskey. He was wearing his plainsman hat. He made the drink last, and when it was gone he ordered another. Did he at any point take off the hat? Perhaps hang it on one of the hooks by the door? No one could remember. “Only I never seen him without it,” Dale Gerard, the barman, said. “He was partial to that hat. If he did take it off, he probably laid it on the bar beside him. He had his second drink, and then he went on his way.” “Was his hat on the bar when he left?” Mizell asked. “No, sir.” “Was it on one of the hooks when you closed up shop for the night?” “No, sir.” Around three o’clock that day, Rebecca Cline left her house at the south end of town to visit the apothecary on Main Street. Her mother had told her she could buy some candy with her birthday dollar, but not eat it, because she had had sweets enough for one day. When five o’clock came and she hadn’t returned home, Mr. Cline and some other men began searching for her. They found her in Barker’s Alley, between the stage depot and the Good Rest. She had been strangled. Her silver dollar was gone. It was only when the grieving father took her in his arms that the men saw Trusdale’s broad-brimmed leather hat. It had been hidden beneath the skirt of the girl’s party dress. During the jury’s lunch hour, hammering was heard from behind the stage depot and not ninety paces from the scene of the crime. This was the gallows going up. The work was supervised by the town’s best carpenter, whose name, appropriately enough, was Mr. John House. Big snow was coming, and the road to Fort Pierre would be impassable, perhaps for a week, perhaps for the entire winter. There were no plans to jug Trusdale in the local calaboose until spring. There was no economy in that. “Nothing to building a gallows,” House told folks who came to watch. “A child could build one of these.” He told how a lever-operated beam would run beneath the trapdoor, and how it would be axle-greased to make sure there wouldn’t be any last-minute holdups. “If you have to do a thing like this, you want to do it right the first time,” House said. In the afternoon, George Andrews put Trusdale on the stand. This occasioned some hissing from the spectators, which Judge Mizell gavelled down, promising to clear the courtroom if folks couldn’t behave themselves. “Did you enter the Chuck-a-Luck Saloon on the day in question?” Andrews asked when order had been restored. “I guess so,” Trusdale said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be here.” There was some laughter at that, which Mizell also gavelled down, although he was smiling himself and did not issue a second admonition. “Did you order two drinks?” “Yes, sir, I did. Two was all I had money for.” “But you got another dollar right quick, didn’t you, you hound!” Abel Hines shouted. Mizell pointed his gavel first at Hines, then at Sheriff Barclay, sitting in the front row. “Sheriff, escort that man out and charge him with disorderly conduct, if you please.” Barclay escorted Hines out but did not charge him with disorderly conduct. Instead, he asked what had got into him. “I’m sorry, Otis,” Hines said. “It was seeing him sitting there with his bare face hanging out.” “You go on downstreet and see if John House needs some help with his work,” Barclay said. “Don’t come back in here until this mess is over.” “He’s got all the help he needs, and it’s snowing hard now.” “You won’t blow away. Go on.” Meanwhile, Trusdale continued to testify. No, he hadn’t left the Chuck-a-Luck wearing his hat, but hadn’t realized it until he got to his place. By then, he said, he was too tired to walk all the way back to town in search of it. Besides, it was dark. Mizell broke in. “Are you asking this court to believe you walked four miles without realizing you weren’t wearing your damn hat?” “I guess since I wear it all the time I just figured it must be there,” Trusdale said. This elicited another gust of laughter. Barclay came back in and took his place next to Dave Fisher. “What are they laughing at?” “Dummy don’t need a hangman,” Fisher said. “He’s tying the knot all by himself. It shouldn’t be funny, but it’s pretty comical, just the same.” “Did you encounter Rebecca Cline in that alley?” George Andrews asked in a loud voice. With every eye on him, he had discovered a heretofore hidden flair for the dramatic. “Did you encounter her and steal her birthday dollar?” “No, sir,” Trusdale said. “Did you kill her?” “No, sir. I didn’t even know who she was.” Mr. Cline rose from his seat and shouted, “You did it, you lying son of a bitch!” “I ain’t lying,” Trusdale said, and that was when Sheriff Barclay believed him. “I have no further questions,” Andrews said, and walked back to his seat. Trusdale started to get up, but Mizell told him to sit still and answer a few more questions. “Do you continue to contend, Mr. Trusdale, that someone stole your hat while you were drinking in the Chuck-a-Luck, and that someone put it on, and went into the alley, and killed Rebecca Cline, and left it there to implicate you?” Trusdale was silent. “Answer the question, Mr. Trusdale.” “Sir, I don’t know what ‘implicate’ means.” “Do you expect us to believe someone framed you for this heinous murder?” Trusdale considered, twisting his hands together. At last he said, “Maybe somebody took it by mistake and throwed it away.” Mizell looked out at the rapt gallery. “Did anyone here take Mr. Trusdale’s hat by mistake?” There was silence, except for the snow hitting the windows. The first big storm of winter had arrived. That was the winter townsfolk called the Wolf Winter, because the wolves came down from the Black Hills in packs to hunt for garbage. “I have no more questions,” Mizell said. “And due to the weather we are going to dispense with any closing statements. The jury will retire to consider a verdict. You have three choices, gentlemen—innocent, manslaughter, or murder in the first degree.” “Girlslaughter, more like it,” someone remarked. Sheriff Barclay and Dave Fisher retired to the Chuck-a-Luck. Abel Hines joined them, brushing snow from the shoulders of his coat. Dale Gerard served them schooners of beer on the house. “No, I don’t want a glass of water, but I’m worried that I might want one.”Buy the print » “Mizell might not have had any more questions,” Barclay said, “but I got one. Never mind the hat. If Trusdale killed her, how come we never found that silver dollar?” “Because he got scared and threw it away,” Hines said. “I don’t think so. He’s too bone-stupid. If he’d had that dollar, he’d have gone back to the Chuck-a-Luck and drunk it up.” “What are you saying?” Dave asked. “That you think he’s innocent?” “I’m saying I wish we’d found that cartwheel.” “Maybe he lost it out a hole in his pocket.” “He didn’t have any holes in his pockets,” Barclay said. “Only one in his boot, and it wasn’t big enough for a dollar to get through.” He drank some of his beer. The tumbleweeds blowing up Main Street looked like ghostly brains in the snow. The jury took an hour and a half. “We voted to hang him on the first ballot,” Kelton Fisher said later, “but we wanted it to look decent.” Mizell asked Trusdale if he had anything to say before sentence was passed. “I can’t think of nothing,” Trusdale said. “Just I never killed that girl.” The storm blew for three days. John House asked Barclay how much he reckoned Trusdale weighed, and Barclay said he guessed the man went around one-forty. House made a dummy out of burlap sacks and filled it with stones, weighing it on the hostelry scales until the needle stood pat on one-forty. Then he hanged the dummy while half the town stood around in the snowdrifts and watched. The trial run went all right. On the night before the execution, the weather cleared. Sheriff Barclay told Trusdale he could have anything he wanted for dinner. Trusdale asked for steak and eggs, with home fries on the side soaked in gravy. Barclay paid for it out of his own pocket, then sat at his desk cleaning his fingernails and listening to the steady clink of Trusdale’s knife and fork on the china plate. When it stopped, he went in. Trusdale was sitting on his bunk. His plate was so clean Barclay figured he must have lapped up the last of the gravy like a dog. He was crying. “Something just come to me,” Trusdale said. “What’s that, Jim?” “If they hang me tomorrow morning, I’ll go into my grave with steak and eggs still in my belly. It won’t have no chance to work through.” For a moment, Barclay said nothing. He was horrified not by the image but because Trusdale had thought of it. Then he said, “Wipe your nose.” Trusdale wiped it. “Now listen to me, Jim, because this is your last chance. You were in that bar in the middle of the afternoon. Not many people in there then. Isn’t that right?” “I guess it is.” “Then who took your hat? Close your eyes. Think back. See it.” Trusdale closed his eyes. Barclay waited. At last Trusdale opened his eyes, which were red from crying. “I can’t even remember was I wearing it.” Barclay sighed. “Give me your plate, and mind that knife.” Trusdale handed the plate through the bars with the knife and fork laid on it, and said he wished he could have some beer. Barclay thought it over, then put on his heavy coat and Stetson and walked down to the Chuck-a-Luck, where he got a small pail of beer from Dale Gerard. Undertaker Hines was just finishing a glass of wine. He followed Barclay out. “Big day tomorrow,” Barclay said. “There hasn’t been a hanging here in ten years, and with luck there won’t be another for ten more. I’ll be gone out of the job by then. I wish I was now.” Hines looked at him. “You really don’t think he killed her.” “If he didn’t,” Barclay said, “whoever did is still walking around.” The hanging was at nine o’clock the next morning. The day was windy and bitterly cold, but most of the town turned out to watch. Pastor Ray Rowles stood on the scaffold next to John House. Both of them were shivering in spite of their coats and scarves. The pages of Pastor Rowles’s Bible fluttered. Tucked into House’s belt, also fluttering, was a hood of homespun cloth dyed black. Barclay led Trusdale, his hands cuffed behind his back, to the gallows. Trusdale was all right until he got to the steps, then he began to buck and cry. “Don’t do this,” he said. “Please don’t do this to me. Please don’t hurt me. Please don’t kill me.” He was strong for a little man, and Barclay motioned Dave Fisher to come and lend a hand. Together they muscled Trusdale, twisting and ducking and pushing, up the twelve wooden steps. Once, he bucked so hard all three of them almost fell off, and arms reached up to catch them if they did. “Quit that and die like a man!” someone shouted. On the platform, Trusdale was momentarily quiet, but when Pastor Rowles commenced Psalm 51, he began to scream. “Like a woman with her tit caught in the wringer,” someone said later in the Chuck-a-Luck. “Have mercy on me, O God, after Thy great goodness,” Rowles read, raising his voice to be heard above the condemned man’s shrieks to be let off. “According to the multitude of Thy mercies, do away with mine offenses.” When Trusdale saw House take the black hood out of his belt, he began to pant like a dog. He shook his head from side to side, trying to dodge the hood. His hair flew. House followed each jerk patiently, like a man who means to bridle a skittish horse. “Let me look at the mountains!” Trusdale bellowed. Runners of snot hung from his nostrils. “I’ll be good if you let me look at the mountains one more time!” But House only jammed the hood over Trusdale’s head and pulled it down to his shaking shoulders. Pastor Rowles was droning on, and Trusdale tried to run off the trapdoor. Barclay and Fisher pushed him back onto it. Down below, someone cried, “Ride ’em, cowboy!” “Say amen,” Barclay told Pastor Rowles. “For Christ’s sake, say amen.” “Amen,” Pastor Rowles said, and stepped back, closing his Bible with a clap. Barclay nodded to House. House pulled the lever. The greased beam retracted and the trap dropped. So did Trusdale. There was a crack when his neck broke. His legs drew up almost to his chin, then fell back limp. Yellow drops stained the snow under his feet. “There, you bastard!” Rebecca Cline’s father shouted. “Died pissing like a dog on a fireplug. Welcome to Hell.” A few people clapped. The spectators stayed until Trusdale’s corpse, still wearing the black hood, was laid in the same hurry-up wagon he’d ridden to town in. Then they dispersed. Barclay went back to the jail and sat in the cell Trusdale had occupied. He sat there for ten minutes. It was cold enough to see his breath. He knew what he was waiting for, and eventually it came. He picked up the small bucket that had held Trusdale’s last drink of beer and vomited. Then he went into his office and stoked up the stove. He was still there eight hours later, trying to read a book, when Abel Hines came in. He said, “You need to come down to the funeral parlor, Otis. There’s something I want to show you.” “What?” “No. You’ll want to see it for yourself.” They walked down to the Hines Funeral Parlor & Mortuary. In the back room, Trusdale lay naked on a cooling board. There was a smell of chemicals and shit. “They load their pants when they die that way,” Hines said. “Even men who go to it with their heads up. They can’t help it. The sphincter lets go.” “And?” “Step over here. I figure a man in your job has seen worse than a pair of shitty drawers.” They lay on the floor, mostly turned inside out. Something gleamed in the mess. Barclay leaned closer and saw it was a silver dollar. He reached down and plucked it from the crap. “I don’t understand it,” Hines said. “Son of a bitch was locked up a good long time.” There was a chair in the corner. Barclay sat down on it so heavily he made a little woof sound. “He must have swallowed it the first time when he saw our lanterns coming. And every time it came out he cleaned it off and swallowed it again.” The two men stared at each other. “You believed him,” Hines said at last. “Fool that I am, I did.” “Maybe that says more about you than it does about him.” “He went on saying he was innocent right to the end. He’ll most likely stand at the throne of God saying the same thing.” “Yes,” Hines said. “I don’t understand. He was going to hang. Either way, he was going to hang. Do you understand it?” “I don’t even understand why the sun comes up. What are you going to do with that cartwheel? Give it back to the girl’s mother and father? It might be better if you didn’t, because . . .” Hines shrugged. Because the Clines knew all along. Everyone in town knew all along. He was the only one who hadn’t known. Fool that he was. “I don’t know what I’m going to do with it,” he said. The wind gusted, bringing the sound of singing. It was coming from the church. It was the Doxology.

The man always sat in the same seat, the stool farthest down the counter. When it wasn’t occupied, that is, but it was nearly always free. The bar was seldom crowded, and that particular seat was the most inconspicuous and the least comfortable. A staircase in the back made the ceiling slanted and low, so it was hard to stand up there without bumping your head. The man was tall, yet, for some reason, preferred that cramped, narrow spot. Kino remembered the first time the man had come to his bar. His appearance had immediately caught Kino’s eye—the bluish shaved head, the thin build yet broad shoulders, the keen glint in his eye, the prominent cheekbones and wide forehead. He looked to be in his early thirties, and he wore a long gray raincoat, though it wasn’t raining. At first, Kino tagged him as a yakuza, and was on his guard around him. It was seven-thirty, on a chilly mid-April evening, and the bar was empty. The man chose the seat at the end of the counter, took off his coat, and in a quiet voice ordered a beer, then silently read a thick book. After half an hour, finished with the beer, he raised his hand an inch or two to motion Kino over, and ordered a whiskey. “Which brand?” Kino asked, but the man said he had no preference. “Just an ordinary sort of Scotch. A double. Add an equal amount of water and a little bit of ice, if you would.” Kino poured some White Label into a glass, added the same amount of water and two small, nicely formed ice cubes. The man took a sip, scrutinized the glass, and narrowed his eyes. “This will do fine.” He read for another half hour, then stood up and paid his bill in cash. He counted out exact change so that he wouldn’t get any coins back. Kino breathed a small sigh of relief as soon as he was out the door. But after the man had left his presence remained. As Kino stood behind the counter, he glanced up occasionally at the seat the man had occupied, half expecting him still to be there, raising his hand a couple of inches to order something. The man began coming regularly to Kino’s bar. Once, at most twice, a week. He would invariably have a beer first, then a whiskey. Sometimes he would study the day’s menu on the blackboard and order a light meal. The man hardly ever said a word. He always came fairly early in the evening, a book tucked under his arm, which he would place on the counter. Whenever he got tired of reading (at least, Kino guessed that he was tired), he looked up from the page and studied the bottles of liquor lined up on the shelves in front of him, as if examining a series of unusual taxidermied animals from faraway lands. Once Kino got used to the man, though, he never felt uncomfortable around him, even when it was just the two of them. Kino never spoke much himself, and didn’t find it hard to remain silent around others. While the man read, Kino did what he would do if he were alone—wash dishes, prepare sauces, choose records to play, or page through the newspaper. Kino didn’t know the man’s name. He was just a regular customer who came to the bar, enjoyed a beer and a whiskey, read silently, paid in cash, then left. He never bothered anybody else. What more did Kino need to know about him? Back in college, Kino had been a standout middle-distance runner, but in his junior year he’d torn his Achilles tendon and had to give up on the idea of joining a corporate track team. After graduation, on his coach’s recommendation, he got a job at a sports-equipment company, and he stayed there for seventeen years. At work, he was in charge of persuading sports stores to stock his brand of running shoes and leading athletes to try them out. The company, a mid-level firm headquartered in Okayama, was far from well known, and lacked the financial power of a Nike or an Adidas to draw up exclusive contracts with the world’s best runners. Still, it made carefully handcrafted shoes for top athletes, and quite a few swore by its products. “Do an honest job and it will pay off” was the slogan of the company’s founder, and that low-key, somewhat anachronistic approach suited Kino’s personality. Even a taciturn, unsociable man like him was able to make a go of sales. Actually, it was because of his personality that coaches trusted him and athletes took a liking to him. He listened carefully to each runner’s needs, and made sure that the head of manufacturing got all the details. The pay wasn’t much to speak of, but he found the job engaging and satisfying. Although he couldn’t run anymore himself, he loved seeing the runners race around the track, their form textbook perfect. When Kino quit his job, it wasn’t because he was dissatisfied with his work but because he discovered that his wife was having an affair with his best friend at the company. Kino spent more time out on the road than at home in Tokyo. He’d stuff a large gym bag full of shoe samples and make the rounds of sporting-goods stores all over Japan, also visiting local colleges and companies that sponsored track teams. His wife and his colleague started sleeping together while he was away. Kino wasn’t the type who easily picked up on clues. He thought everything was fine with his marriage, and nothing his wife said or did tipped him off to the contrary. If he hadn’t happened to come home from a business trip a day early, he might never have discovered what was going on. When he got back to Tokyo that day, he went straight to his condo in Kasai, only to find his wife and his friend naked and entwined in his bedroom, in the bed where he and his wife slept. His wife was on top, and when Kino opened the door he came face to face with her and her lovely breasts bouncing up and down. He was thirty-nine then, his wife thirty-five. They had no children. Kino lowered his head, shut the bedroom door, left the apartment, and never went back. The next day, he quit his job. Kino had an unmarried aunt, his mother’s older sister. Ever since he was a child, his aunt had been nice to him. She’d had an older boyfriend for many years (“lover” might be the more accurate term), and he had generously given her a small house in Aoyama. She lived on the second floor of the house, and ran a coffee shop on the first floor. In front was a small garden and an impressive willow tree, with low-hanging, leafy branches. The house was on a narrow backstreet behind the Nezu Museum, not exactly the best location for drawing customers, but his aunt had a gift for attracting people, and her coffee shop did a decent amount of business. After she turned sixty, though, she hurt her back, and it became increasingly difficult for her to run the shop alone. She decided to move to a resort condo in the Izu Kogen Highlands. “I was wondering if eventually you might want to take over the shop?” she asked Kino. This was three months before he discovered his wife’s affair. “I appreciate the offer,” he told her, “but right now I’m happy where I am.” After he submitted his resignation at work, he phoned his aunt to ask if she’d sold the shop yet. It was listed with a real-estate agent, she told him, but no serious offers had come in. “I’d like to open a bar there if I can,” Kino said. “Could I pay you rent by the month?” “But what about your job?” she asked. “I quit a couple of days ago.” “Didn’t your wife have a problem with that?” “We’re probably going to get divorced soon.” Kino didn’t explain the reason, and his aunt didn’t ask. There was silence for a time on the other end of the line. Then his aunt named a figure for the monthly rent, far lower than what Kino had expected. “I think I can handle that,” he told her. He and his aunt had never talked all that much (his mother had discouraged him from getting close to her), but they’d always seemed to have a kind of mutual understanding. She knew that Kino wasn’t the type of person to break a promise. Kino used half of his savings to transform the coffee shop into a bar. He purchased simple furniture, and had a long, sturdy bar installed. He put up new wallpaper in a calming color, brought his record collection from home, and lined a shelf in the bar with LPs. He owned a decent stereo—a Thorens turntable, a Luxman amp, and small JBL two-way speakers—that he’d bought when he was single, a fairly extravagant purchase back then. But he had always enjoyed listening to old jazz records. It was his only hobby, one that he didn’t share with anyone else he knew. In college, he’d worked part time as a bartender at a pub in Roppongi, so he was well versed in the art of mixing cocktails. He called his bar Kino. He couldn’t come up with a better name. The first week he was open, he didn’t have a single customer, but he wasn’t perturbed. After all, he hadn’t advertised the place, or even put out an eye-catching sign. He simply waited patiently for curious people to stumble across this little backstreet bar. He still had some of his severance pay, and his wife hadn’t asked for any financial support. She was already living with his former colleague, and she and Kino had decided to sell their condo in Kasai. Kino lived on the second floor of his aunt’s house, and it looked as though, for the time being, he’d be able to get by. As he waited for his first customer, Kino enjoyed listening to whatever music he liked and reading books he’d been wanting to read. Like dry ground welcoming the rain, he let the solitude, silence, and loneliness soak in. He listened to a lot of Art Tatum solo-piano pieces. Somehow they seemed to fit his mood. “Always ‘billionaire playboy.’ Never ‘billionaire genius.’ ”Buy the print » He wasn’t sure why, but he felt no anger or bitterness toward his wife, or the colleague she was sleeping with. The betrayal had been a shock, for sure, but, as time passed, he began to feel as if it couldn’t have been helped, as if this had been his fate all along. In his life, after all, he had achieved nothing, had been totally unproductive. He couldn’t make anyone else happy, and, of course, couldn’t make himself happy. Happiness? He wasn’t even sure what that meant. He didn’t have a clear sense, either, of emotions like pain or anger, disappointment or resignation, and how they were supposed to feel. The most he could do was create a place where his heart—devoid now of any depth or weight—could be tethered, to keep it from wandering aimlessly. This little bar, Kino, tucked into a backstreet, became that place. And it became, too—not by design, exactly—a strangely comfortable space. It wasn’t a person who first discovered what a comfortable place Kino was but a stray cat. A young gray female with a long, lovely tail. The cat favored a sunken display case in a corner of the bar and liked to curl up there to sleep. Kino didn’t pay much attention to the cat, figuring it wanted to be left alone. Once a day, he fed it and changed its water, but nothing beyond that. And he constructed a small pet door so that it could go in and out of the bar whenever it liked. The cat may have brought some good luck along with it, for after it appeared so did a scattering of customers. Some of them started to come by regularly—ones who took a liking to this little backstreet bar with its wonderful old willow tree, its quiet middle-aged owner, vintage records spinning on a turntable, and the gray cat sacked out in a corner. And these people sometimes brought other new customers. Still far from thriving, the bar at least earned back the rent. For Kino, that was enough. The young man with the shaved head started coming to the bar about two months after it opened. And it was another two months before Kino learned his name, Kamita. It was raining lightly that day, the kind of rain where you aren’t sure if you really need an umbrella. There were just three customers in the bar, Kamita and two men in suits. It was seven-thirty. As always, Kamita was at the farthest stool down the counter, sipping a White Label and water and reading. The two men were seated at a table, drinking a bottle of Pinot Noir. They had brought the bottle with them, and asked Kino if he would mind their drinking it there, for a five-thousand-yen cork fee. It was a first for Kino, but he had no reason to refuse. He opened the bottle and set down two wineglasses and a bowl of mixed nuts. Not much trouble at all. The two men smoked a lot, though, which for Kino, who hated cigarette smoke, made them less welcome. With little else to do, Kino sat on a stool and listened to the Coleman Hawkins LP with the track “Joshua Fit the Battle of Jericho.” He found the bass solo by Major Holley amazing. At first, the two men seemed to be getting along fine, enjoying their wine, but then a difference of opinion arose on some topic or other—what it was, Kino had no idea—and the men grew steadily more worked up. At some point, one of them stood, tipping the table and sending the full ashtray and one of the wineglasses crashing to the floor. Kino hurried over with a broom, swept up the mess, and put a clean glass and ashtray on the table. Kamita—though at this time Kino had yet to learn his name—was clearly disgusted by the men’s behavior. His expression didn’t change, but he kept tapping the fingers of his left hand lightly on the counter, like a pianist checking the keys. I have to get this situation under control, Kino thought. He went over to the men. “I’m sorry,” he said politely, “but I wonder if you’d mind keeping your voices down a bit.” One of them looked up at him with a cold glint in his eye and rose from the table. Kino hadn’t noticed it until now, but the man was huge. He wasn’t so much tall as barrel-chested, with enormous arms, the sort of build you’d expect of a sumo wrestler. The other man was much smaller. Thin and pale, with a shrewd look, the type who was good at egging people on. He slowly got up from his seat, too, and Kino found himself face to face with both of them. The men had apparently decided to use this opportunity to call a halt to their quarrel and jointly confront Kino. They were perfectly coördinated, almost as if they had secretly been waiting for this very situation to arise. “So, you think you can just butt in and interrupt us?” the larger of the two said, his voice hard and low. The suits they wore seemed expensive, but closer inspection showed them to be tacky and poorly made. Not full-fledged yakuza, though whatever work they were involved in was, clearly, not respectable. The larger man had a crew cut, while his companion’s hair was dyed brown and pulled back in a high ponytail. Kino steeled himself for something bad to happen. Sweat began to pour from his armpits. “Pardon me,” another voice said. Kino turned to find that Kamita was standing behind him. “Don’t blame the staff,” Kamita said, pointing to Kino. “I’m the one who asked him to request that you keep it down. It makes it hard to concentrate, and I can’t read my book.” Kamita’s voice was calmer, more languid, than usual. But something, unseen, was beginning to stir. “Can’t read my book,” the smaller man repeated, as if making sure that there was nothing ungrammatical about the sentence. “What, don’t ya got a home?” the larger man asked Kamita. “I do,” Kamita replied. “I live nearby.” “Then why don’t ya go home and read there?” “I like reading here,” Kamita said. The two men exchanged a look. “Hand over the book,” the smaller man said. “I’ll read it for you.” “I like to read by myself, quietly,” Kamita said. “And I’d hate it if you mispronounced any of the words.” “Aren’t you a piece of work,” the larger man said. “What a funny guy.” “What’s your name, anyway?” Ponytail asked. “My name is Kamita,” he said. “It’s written with the characters for ‘god’—kami—and ‘field’: ‘god’s field.’ But it isn’t pronounced ‘Kanda,’ as you might expect. It’s pronounced ‘Kamita.’ ” “I’ll remember that,” the large man said. “Good idea. Memories can be useful,” Kamita said. “Anyway, how about we step outside?” the smaller man said. “That way, we can say exactly what we want to.” “Fine with me,” Kamita said. “Anywhere you say. But, before we do that, could you pay your check? You don’t want to cause the bar any trouble.” Kamita asked Kino to bring over their check, and he laid exact change for his own drink on the counter. Ponytail extracted a ten-thousand-yen bill from his wallet and tossed it onto the table. “I don’t need any change back,” Ponytail told Kino. “But why don’t ya buy yourself some better wineglasses? This is expensive wine, and glasses like these make it taste like shit.” “What a cheap joint,” the larger man said, sneeringly. “Correct. A cheap bar with cheap customers,” Kamita said. “It doesn’t suit you. There’s got to be somewhere else that does. Not that I know where.” “Now, aren’t you the wise guy,” the large man said. “You make me laugh.” “Think it over later on, and have a good, long laugh,” Kamita said. “No way you’re gonna tell me where I should go,” Ponytail said. He slowly licked his lips, like a snake sizing up its prey. The large man opened the door and stepped outside, Ponytail following behind. Perhaps sensing the tension in the air, the cat, despite the rain, leaped outside after them. “Are you sure you’re O.K.?” Kino asked Kamita. “Not to worry,” Kamita said, with a slight smile. “You don’t need to do anything, Mr. Kino. Just stay put. This will be over soon.” Kamita went outside and shut the door. It was still raining, a little harder than before. Kino sat down on a stool and waited. It was oddly still outside, and he couldn’t hear a thing. Kamita’s book lay open on the counter, like a well-trained dog waiting for its master. About ten minutes later, the door opened, and in strode Kamita, alone. “Would you mind lending me a towel?” he asked. Kino handed him a fresh towel, and Kamita wiped his head. Then his neck, face, and, finally, both hands. “Thank you. Everything’s O.K. now,” he said. “Those two won’t be showing their faces here again.” “What in the world happened?” Kamita just shook his head, as if to say, “Better you don’t know.” He went over to his seat, downed the rest of his whiskey, and picked up where he’d left off in his book. Later that evening, after Kamita had gone, Kino went outside and made a circuit of the neighborhood. The alley was deserted and quiet. No signs of a fight, no trace of blood. He couldn’t imagine what had taken place. He went back to the bar to wait for other customers, but no one else came that night. The cat didn’t return, either. He poured himself some White Label, added an equal amount of water and two small ice cubes, and tasted it. Nothing special, about what you’d expect. But that night he needed a shot of alcohol in his system. About a week after the incident, Kino slept with a female customer. She was the first woman he’d had sex with since he left his wife. She was thirty, or perhaps a little older. He wasn’t sure if she would be classified as beautiful, but there was something unique about her, something that stood out. The woman had been to the bar several times before, always in the company of a man of about the same age who wore tortoiseshell-framed glasses and a beatnik-like goatee. He had unruly hair and never wore a tie, so Kino figured he was probably not your typical company employee. The woman always wore a tight-fitting dress that showed off her slender, shapely figure. They sat at the bar, exchanging an occasional hushed word or two as they sipped cocktails or sherry. They never stayed long. Kino imagined they were having a drink before they made love. Or else after. He couldn’t say which, but the way they drank reminded him of sex. Drawn-out, intense sex. The two of them were strangely expressionless, especially the woman, whom Kino had never seen smile. She spoke to him sometimes, always about the music that was playing. She liked jazz and was collecting LPs herself. “My father used to listen to this music at home,” she told him. “Hearing it brings back a lot of memories.” From her tone, Kino couldn’t tell if the memories were of the music or of her father. But he didn’t venture to ask. Buy the print » Kino actually tried not to have too much to do with the woman. It was clear that the man wasn’t very pleased when he was friendly to her. One time he and the woman did have a lengthy conversation—exchanging tips on used-record stores in Tokyo and the best way to take care of vinyl—and, after that, the man kept shooting him cold, suspicious looks. Kino was usually careful to keep his distance from any sort of entanglement. Nothing was worse than jealousy and pride, and Kino had had a number of awful experiences because of one or the other. It struck him at times that there was something about him that stirred up the dark side in other people. That night, though, the woman came to the bar alone. There were no other customers, and when she opened the door cool night air crept in. She sat at the counter, ordered a brandy, and asked Kino to play some Billie Holiday. “Something really old, if you could.” Kino put a Columbia record on the turntable, one with the track “Georgia on My Mind.” The two of them listened silently. “Could you play the other side, too?” she asked, when it ended, and he did as she requested. She slowly worked her way through three brandies, listening to a few more records—Erroll Garner’s “Moonglow,” Buddy DeFranco’s “I Can’t Get Started.” At first, Kino thought she was waiting for the man, but she didn’t glance at her watch even once. She just sat there, listening to the music, lost in thought, sipping her brandy. “Your friend isn’t coming today?” Kino decided to ask as closing time drew near. “He isn’t coming. He’s far away,” the woman said. She stood up from the stool and walked over to where the cat lay sleeping. She gently stroked its back with her fingertips. The cat, unperturbed, went on sleeping. “We’re thinking of not seeing each other anymore,” the woman said. Kino didn’t know how to respond, so he said nothing, and continued to straighten up behind the counter. “I’m not sure how to put it,” the woman said. She stopped petting the cat and went back to the bar, high heels clicking. “Our relationship isn’t exactly . . . normal.” “Not exactly normal.” Kino repeated her words without really considering what they meant. She finished the small amount of brandy left in her glass. “I have something I’d like to show you, Mr. Kino,” she said. Whatever it was, Kino didn’t want to see it. Of that he was certain. But he didn’t manage to produce the words to say so. The woman removed her cardigan and placed it on the stool. She reached both hands behind her and unzipped her dress. She turned her back to Kino. Just below her white bra clasp he saw an irregular sprinkling of marks the color of faded charcoal, like bruises. They reminded him of constellations in the winter sky. A dark row of depleted stars. The woman said nothing, just displayed her bare back to Kino. Like someone who cannot even comprehend the meaning of the question he has been asked, Kino just stared at the marks. Finally, she zipped up and turned to face him. She put on her cardigan and fixed her hair. “Those are cigarette burns,” she said simply. Kino was at a loss for words. But he had to say something. “Who did that to you?” he asked, his voice parched. The woman didn’t reply, and Kino realized that he wasn’t hoping for an answer. “I have them in other places, too,” she said finally, her voice drained of expression. “Places that are . . . a little hard to show.” Kino had felt, from the first, that there was something out of the ordinary about the woman. Something had triggered an instinctive response, warning him not to get involved with her. He was basically a cautious person. If he really needed to sleep with a woman, he could always make do with a professional. And it wasn’t as if he were even attracted to this woman. But that night she desperately wanted a man to make love to her—and it seemed that he was the man. Her eyes were depthless, the pupils strangely dilated, but there was a decisive glitter in them that would brook no retreat. Kino didn’t have the power to resist. He locked up the bar, and the two of them went upstairs. In the bedroom, the woman quickly took off her dress, peeled off her underwear, and showed him the places that were a little hard to show. Kino couldn’t help averting his eyes at first, but then was drawn back to look. He couldn’t understand, nor did he want to understand, the mind of a man who would do something so cruel, or of a woman who would willingly endure it. It was a savage scene from a barren planet, light-years away from where Kino lived. The woman took his hand and guided it to the scars, making him touch each one in turn. There were scars on her breasts, and beside her vagina. He traced those dark, hard marks, as if he were using a pencil to connect the dots. The marks seemed to form a shape that reminded him of something, but he couldn’t think what it was. They had sex on the tatami floor. No words exchanged, no foreplay, no time even to turn off the light or lay out the futon. The woman’s tongue slid down his throat, her nails dug into his back. Under the light, like two starving animals, they devoured the flesh they craved. When dawn began to show outside, they crawled onto the futon and slept, as if dragged down into darkness. Kino awoke just before noon, and the woman was gone. He felt as if he’d had a very realistic dream, but of course it hadn’t been a dream. His back was lined with scratches, his arms with bite marks, his penis wrung by a dull ache. Several long black hairs swirled around his white pillow, and the sheets had a strong scent he’d never smelled before. The woman came to the bar several times after that, always with the goateed man. They would sit at the counter, speak in subdued voices as they drank a cocktail or two, and then leave. The woman would exchange a few words with Kino, mostly about music. Her tone was the same as before, as if she had no memory of what had taken place between them that night. Still, Kino could detect a glint of desire in her eyes, like a faint light deep down a mineshaft. He was sure of it. And it brought everything vividly back to him—the stab of her nails into his back, the sting of his penis, her long, slithering tongue, the odor on his bedding. As he and the woman spoke, the man with her carefully observed Kino’s expression and behavior. Kino sensed something viscous entwining itself about the couple, as if there were a deep secret only the two of them shared. At the end of the summer, Kino’s divorce was finalized, and he and his wife met at his bar one afternoon, before it opened, to take care of a few last matters. The legal issues were quickly settled, and the two of them signed the necessary documents. Kino’s wife was wearing a new blue dress, her hair cut short. She looked healthier and more cheerful than he’d ever seen her. She’d begun a new, no doubt more fulfilling, life. She glanced around the bar. “What a wonderful place,” she said. “Quiet, clean, and calm—very you.” A short silence followed. “But there’s nothing here that really moves you”: Kino imagined that these were the words she wanted to say. “Would you like something to drink?” he asked. “A little red wine, if you have some.” Kino took out two wineglasses and poured some Napa Zinfandel. They drank in silence. They weren’t about to toast to their divorce. The cat padded over and, surprisingly, leaped into Kino’s lap. Kino petted it behind its ears. “I need to apologize to you,” his wife said finally. “For what?” Kino asked. “For hurting you,” she said. “You were hurt, a little, weren’t you?” “I suppose so,” Kino said, after giving it some thought. “I’m human, after all. I was hurt. But whether it was a lot or a little I can’t say.” “I wanted to see you and tell you I’m sorry.” Kino nodded. “You’ve apologized, and I’ve accepted your apology. No need to worry about it anymore.” “I wanted to tell you what was going on, but I just couldn’t find the words.” “But wouldn’t we have arrived at the same place, anyway?” “I guess so,” his wife said. Kino took a sip of wine. “It’s nobody’s fault,” he said. “I shouldn’t have come home a day early. Or I should have let you know I was coming. Then we wouldn’t have had to go through that.” His wife didn’t say anything. “When did you start seeing that guy?” Kino asked. “I don’t think we should get into that.” “Better for me not to know, you mean? Maybe you’re right about that,” Kino admitted. He kept on petting the cat, which purred deeply. Another first. “Maybe I don’t have the right to say this,” his wife said, “but I think it’d be good for you to forget about what happened and find someone new.” “Maybe,” Kino said. “I know there must be a woman out there who’s right for you. It shouldn’t be that hard to find her. I wasn’t able to be that person for you, and I did a terrible thing. I feel awful about it. But there was something wrong between us from the start, as if we’d done the buttons up wrong. I think you should be able to have a more normal, happy life.” Done the buttons up wrong, Kino thought. He looked at the new dress she was wearing. They were sitting facing each other, so he couldn’t tell if there was a zipper or buttons at the back. But he couldn’t help thinking about what he would see if he unzipped or unbuttoned her clothes. Her body was no longer his, so all he could do was imagine it. When he closed his eyes, he saw countless dark-brown burn marks wriggling on her pure-white back, like a swarm of worms. He shook his head to dispel that image, and his wife seemed to misinterpret this. She gently laid her hand on top of his. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m truly sorry.” Fall came and the cat disappeared. It took a few days for Kino to realize that it was gone. This cat—still nameless—came to the bar when it wanted to and sometimes didn’t show up for a while, so if Kino didn’t see it for a week, or even ten days, he wasn’t particularly worried. He was fond of the cat, and the cat seemed to trust him. It was also like a good-luck charm for the bar. Kino had the distinct impression that as long as it was asleep in a corner nothing bad would happen. But when two weeks had passed he began to be concerned. After three weeks, Kino’s gut told him that the cat wouldn’t be coming back. Around the time that the cat disappeared, Kino started to notice snakes outside, near the building. Buy the print » The first snake he saw was a dull brown and long. It was in the shade of the willow tree in the front yard, leisurely slithering along. Kino, a bag of groceries in hand, was unlocking the door when he spotted it. It was rare to see a snake in the middle of Tokyo. He was a bit surprised, but he didn’t worry about it. Behind his building was the Nezu Museum, with its large gardens. It wasn’t inconceivable that a snake might be living there. But two days later, as he opened the door just before noon to retrieve the paper, he saw a different snake in the same spot. This one was bluish, smaller than the other one, and slimy-looking. When the snake saw Kino, it stopped, raised its head slightly, and stared at him, as if it knew him. Kino hesitated, unsure what to do, and the snake slowly lowered its head and vanished into the shade. The whole thing gave Kino the creeps. Three days later, he spied the third snake. It was also under the willow tree in the front yard. This snake was considerably smaller than the others and blackish. Kino knew nothing about snakes, but this one struck him as the most dangerous. It looked poisonous, somehow. The instant it sensed his presence, it slipped away into the weeds. Three snakes within the space of a week, no matter how you considered it, was too many. Something strange was going on. Kino phoned his aunt in Izu. After bringing her up to date on neighborhood goings on, he asked if she had ever seen snakes around the house in Aoyama. “Snakes?” his aunt said loudly, in surprise. “I lived there for a long time but can’t recall ever seeing any snakes. I wonder if it’s a sign of an earthquake or something. Animals sense disasters coming and start to act strange.” “If that’s true, then maybe I’d better stock up on emergency rations,” Kino said. “That might be a good idea. Tokyo’s going to get hit with a huge earthquake someday.” “But are snakes that sensitive to earthquakes?” “I don’t know what they’re sensitive to,” his aunt said. “But snakes are smart creatures. In ancient legends, they often help guide people. But, when a snake leads you, you don’t know whether it’s taking you in a good direction or a bad one. In most cases, it’s a combination of good and evil.” “It’s ambiguous,” Kino said. “Exactly. Snakes are essentially ambiguous creatures. In these legends, the biggest, smartest snake hides its heart somewhere outside its body, so that it doesn’t get killed. If you want to kill that snake, you need to go to its hideout when it’s not there, locate the beating heart, and cut it in two. Not an easy task, for sure.” How did his aunt know all this? “The other day I was watching a show on NHK comparing different legends around the world,” she explained, “and a professor from some university was talking about this. TV can be pretty useful—when you have time, you ought to watch more TV.” Kino began to feel as if the house were surrounded by snakes. He sensed their quiet presence. At midnight, when he closed the bar, the neighborhood was still, with no sound other than the occasional siren. So quiet he could almost hear a snake slithering along. He took a board and nailed shut the pet door he’d built for the cat, so that no snakes would get inside the house. One night, just before ten, Kamita appeared. He had a beer, followed by his usual double White Label, and ate a stuffed-cabbage dish. It was unusual for him to come by so late, and stay so long. Occasionally, he glanced up from his reading to stare at the wall in front of him, as if pondering something. As closing time approached, he remained, until he was the last customer. “Mr. Kino,” Kamita said rather formally, after he’d paid his bill. “I find it very regrettable that it’s come to this.” “Come to this?” Kino repeated. “That you’ll have to close the bar. Even if only temporarily.” Kino stared at Kamita, not knowing how to respond. Close the bar? Kamita glanced around the deserted bar, then turned back to Kino. “You haven’t quite grasped what I’m saying, have you?” “I don’t think I have.” “I really liked this bar a lot,” Kamita said, as if confiding in him. “It was quiet, so I could read, and I enjoyed the music. I was very happy when you opened the bar here. Unfortunately, though, there are some things missing.” “Missing?” Kino said. He had no idea what this could mean. All he could picture was a teacup with a tiny chip in its rim. “That gray cat won’t be coming back,” Kamita said. “For the time being, at least.” “Because this place is missing something?” Kamita didn’t reply. Kino followed Kamita’s gaze, and looked carefully around the bar, but saw nothing out of the ordinary. He did, though, get a sense that the place felt emptier than ever, lacking vitality and color. Something beyond the usual, just-closed-for–the-night feeling. Kamita spoke up. “Mr. Kino, you’re not the type who would willingly do something wrong. I know that very well. But there are times in this world when it’s not enough just not to do the wrong thing. Some people use that blank space as a kind of loophole. Do you understand what I’m saying?” Kino didn’t understand. “Think it over carefully,” Kamita said, gazing straight into Kino’s eyes. “It’s a very important question, worth some serious thought. Though the answer may not come all that easily.” “You’re saying that some serious trouble has occurred, not because I did something wrong but because I didn’t do the right thing? Some trouble concerning this bar, or me?” Kamita nodded. “You could put it that way. But I’m not blaming just you, Mr. Kino. I’m at fault, too, for not having noticed it earlier. I should have been paying more attention. This was a comfortable place not just for me but for anybody.” “Then what should I do?” Kino asked. “Close the bar for a while and go far away. There’s nothing else you can do at this point. I think it’s best for you to leave before we have another long spell of rain. Excuse me for asking, but do you have enough money to take a long trip?” “I guess I could cover it for a while.” “Good. You can worry about what comes after that when you get to that point.” “Who are you, anyway?” “I’m just a guy named Kamita,” Kamita said. “Written with the characters for kami, ‘god,’ and ta, ‘field,’ but not read as ‘Kanda.’ I’ve lived around here for a long time.” Kino decided to plunge ahead and ask. “Mr. Kamita, I have a question. Have you seen snakes around here before?” Kamita didn’t respond. “Here’s what you do. Go far away, and don’t stay in one place for long. And every Monday and Thursday make sure to send a postcard. Then I’ll know you’re O.K.” “A postcard?” “Any kind of picture postcard of where you are.” “But who should I address it to?” “You can mail it to your aunt in Izu. Do not write your own name or any message whatsoever. Just put the address you’re sending it to. This is very important, so don’t forget.” Kino looked at him in surprise. “You know my aunt?” “Yes, I know her quite well. Actually, she asked me to keep an eye on you, to make sure that nothing bad happened. Seems like I fell down on the job, though.” Who in the world is this man? Kino asked himself. “Mr. Kino, when I know that it’s all right for you to return I’ll get in touch with you. Until then, stay away from here. Do you understand?” That night, Kino packed for the trip. It’s best for you to leave before we have another long spell of rain. The announcement was so sudden, and its logic eluded him. But Kamita’s words had a strange persuasive power that went beyond logic. Kino didn’t doubt him. He stuffed some clothes and toiletries into a medium-sized shoulder bag, the same bag he’d used on business trips. As dawn came, he pinned a notice to the front door: “Our apologies, but the bar will be closed for the time being.” Far away, Kamita had told him. But where he should actually go he had no idea. Should he head north? Or south? He decided that he would start by retracing a route he often used to take when he was selling running shoes. He boarded a highway express bus and went to Takamatsu. He would make one circuit of Shikoku and then head over to Kyushu. He checked into a business hotel near Takamatsu Station and stayed there for three days. He wandered around the town and went to see a few movies. The cinemas were deserted during the day, and the movies were, without exception, mind-numbing. When it got dark, he returned to his room and switched on the TV. He followed his aunt’s advice and watched educational programs, but got no useful information from them. The second day in Takamatsu was a Thursday, so he bought a postcard at a convenience store, affixed a stamp, and mailed it to his aunt. As Kamita had instructed him, he wrote only her name and address. “Think it over carefully,” Kamita had told him. “It’s a very important question, worth some serious thought.” But, no matter how seriously he considered it, Kino couldn’t work out what the problem was. A few days later, Kino was staying at a cheap business hotel near Kumamoto Station, in Kyushu. Low ceiling, narrow, cramped bed, tiny TV set, minuscule bathtub, crummy little fridge. He felt like some awkward, bumbling giant. Still, except for a trip to a nearby convenience store, he stayed holed up in the room all day. At the store, he purchased a small flask of whiskey, some mineral water, and some crackers to snack on. He lay on his bed, reading. When he got tired of reading, he watched TV. When he got tired of watching TV, he read. It was his third day in Kumamoto now. He still had money in his savings account and, if he’d wanted to, he could have stayed in a much better hotel. But he felt that, for him, just now, this was the right place. If he stayed in a small space like this, he wouldn’t have to do any unnecessary thinking, and everything he needed was within reach. He was unexpectedly grateful for this. All he wished for was some music. Teddy Wilson, Vic Dickenson, Buck Clayton—sometimes he longed desperately to listen to their old-time jazz, with its steady, dependable technique and its straightforward chords. He wanted to feel the pure joy they had in performing, their wonderful optimism. But his record collection was far away. He pictured his bar, quiet since he’d closed it. The alleyway, the large willow tree. People reading the sign he’d posted and leaving. What about the cat? If it came back, it would find its door boarded up. And were the snakes still silently encircling the house? “Are you sure you can cure me of leg cramps?”Buy the print » Straight across from his eighth-floor window was the window of an office building. From morning till evening, he watched people working there. He had no idea what kind of business it was. Men in ties would pop in and out, while women tapped away at computer keyboards, answered the phone, filed documents. Not exactly the sort of scene to draw one’s interest. The features and the clothes of the people working there were ordinary, banal even. Kino watched them for hours for one simple reason: he had nothing else to do. And he found it unexpected, surprising, how happy the people sometimes looked. Some of them occasionally burst out laughing. Why? Working all day in such an unglamorous office, doing things that (at least to Kino’s eyes) seemed totally uninspired—how could they do that and still feel so happy? Was there some secret hidden there that he couldn’t comprehend? It was about time for him to move on again. Don’t stay in one place for long, Kamita had told him. Yet somehow Kino couldn’t bring himself to leave this cramped little Kumamoto hotel. He couldn’t think of anywhere he wanted to go. The world was a vast ocean with no landmarks, Kino a little boat that had lost its chart and its anchor. When he spread open the map of Kyushu, wondering where to go next, he felt nauseated, as if seasick. He lay down in bed and read a book, glancing up now and then to watch the people in the office across the way. It was a Monday, so he bought a postcard in the hotel gift shop with a picture of Kumamoto Castle, wrote his aunt’s name and address, and slapped on a stamp. He held the postcard for a while, vacantly gazing at the castle. A stereotypical photo, the kind you expect to see on a postcard: the castle keep towering grandly in front of a blue sky and puffy white clouds. No matter how long he looked at the photo, Kino could find no point of contact between himself and that castle. Then, on an impulse, he turned the postcard over and wrote a message to his aunt: How are you? How is your back these days? As you can see, I’m still travelling around by myself. Sometimes I feel as if I were half transparent. As if you could see right through to my internal organs, like a fresh-caught squid. Other than that, I’m doing O.K. I hope to visit sometime. Kino Kino wasn’t at all sure what had motivated him to write that. Kamita had strictly forbidden it. But Kino couldn’t restrain himself. I have to somehow get connected to reality again, he thought, or else I won’t be me anymore. I’ll become a man who doesn’t exist. And, before he could change his mind, he hurried out to a mailbox near the hotel and slipped the postcard inside. When he awoke, the clock next to his bed showed two-fifteen. Someone was knocking on his door. Not a loud knock but a firm, compact sound, like that of a skilled carpenter pounding a nail. The sound dragged Kino out of a deep sleep until his consciousness was thoroughly, even cruelly, clear. Kino knew what the knocking meant. And he knew that he was supposed to get out of bed and open the door. Whatever was doing the knocking didn’t have the strength to open the door from the outside. It had to be opened by Kino’s own hand. It struck him that this visit was exactly what he’d been hoping for, yet, at the same time, what he’d been fearing above all. This was ambiguity: holding on to an empty space between two extremes. “You were hurt, a little, weren’t you?” his wife had asked. “I’m human, after all. I was hurt,” he’d replied. But that wasn’t true. Half of it, at least, was a lie. I wasn’t hurt enough when I should have been, Kino admitted to himself. When I should have felt real pain, I stifled it. I didn’t want to take it on, so I avoided facing up to it. Which is why my heart is so empty now. The snakes have grabbed that spot and are trying to hide their coldly beating hearts there. “This was a comfortable place not just for me but for anybody,” Kamita had said. Kino finally understood what he meant. Kino pulled the covers up, shut his eyes, and covered his ears with his hands. I’m not going to look, not going to listen, he told himself. But he couldn’t drown out the sound. Even if he ran to the far corners of the earth and stuffed his ears full of clay, as long as he was still alive those knocks would relentlessly track him down. It wasn’t a knocking on a door in a business hotel. It was a knocking on the door to his heart. A person couldn’t escape that sound. He wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but he realized that the knocking had stopped. The room was as hushed as the far side of the moon. Still, Kino remained under the covers. He had to be on his guard. The being outside his door wouldn’t give up that easily. It was in no hurry. The moon wasn’t out. Only the withered constellations darkly dotted the sky. The world belonged, for a while longer, to those other beings. They had many different methods. They could get what they wanted in all kinds of ways. The roots of darkness could spread everywhere beneath the earth. Patiently taking their time, searching out weak points, they could break apart the most solid rock. Finally, as Kino had expected, the knocks began once more. But this time they came from another direction. Much closer than before. Whoever was knocking was right outside the window by his bed. Clinging to the sheer wall of the building, eight stories up, tap–tap-tapping on the rain-streaked glass. The knocking kept the same beat. Twice. Then twice again. On and on without stopping. Like the sound of a heart beating with emotion. The curtain was open. Before he fell asleep, he’d been watching the patterns the raindrops formed on the glass. Kino could imagine what he’d see now, if he stuck his head outside the covers. No—he couldn’t imagine it. He had to extinguish the ability to imagine anything. I shouldn’t look at it, he told himself. No matter how empty it may be, this is still my heart. There’s still some human warmth in it. Memories, like seaweed wrapped around pilings on the beach, wordlessly waiting for high tide. Emotions that, if cut, would bleed. I can’t just let them wander somewhere beyond my understanding. “Memories can be helpful,” Kamita had said. A sudden thought struck Kino: that Kamita was somehow connected with the old willow tree in front of his house. He didn’t grasp how this made sense, exactly, but once the thought took hold of him things fell into place. Kino pictured the limbs of the tree, covered in green, sagging heavily down, nearly to the ground. In the summer, they provided cool shade to the yard. On rainy days, gold droplets glistened on their soft branches. On windy days, they swayed like a restless heart, and tiny birds flew over, screeching at one another, alighting neatly on the thin, supple branches only to take off again. Under the covers, Kino curled up like a worm, shut his eyes tight, and thought of the willow. One by one, he pictured its qualities—its color and shape and movements. And he prayed for dawn to come. All he could do was wait like this, patiently, until it grew light out and the birds awoke and began their day. All he could do was trust in the birds, in all the birds, with their wings and beaks. Until then, he couldn’t let his heart go blank. That void, the vacuum created by it, would draw them in. When the willow tree wasn’t enough, Kino thought of the slim gray cat, and its fondness for grilled seaweed. He remembered Kamita at the counter, lost in a book, young runners going through gruelling repetition drills on a track, the lovely Ben Webster solo on “My Romance.” He remembered his wife in her new blue dress, her hair trimmed short. He hoped that she was living a healthy, happy life in her new home. Without, he hoped, any wounds on her body. She apologized right to my face, and I accepted that, he thought. I need to learn not just to forget but to forgive. But the movement of time seemed not to be fixed properly. The bloody weight of desire and the rusty anchor of remorse were blocking its normal flow. The continuing rain, the confused hands of the clock, the birds still fast asleep, a faceless postal worker silently sorting through postcards, his wife’s lovely breasts bouncing violently in the air, something obstinately tapping on the window. As if luring him deeper into a suggestive maze, this ever-regular beat. Tap tap, tap tap, then once more—tap tap. “Don’t look away, look right at it,” someone whispered in his ear. “This is what your heart looks like.” The willow branches swayed in the early-summer breeze. In a small dark room, somewhere inside Kino, a warm hand was reaching out to him. Eyes shut, he felt that hand on his, soft and substantial. He’d forgotten this, had been apart from it for far too long. Yes, I am hurt. Very, very deeply. He said this to himself. And he wept. All the while the rain did not let up, drenching the world in a cold chill. ♦ (Translated, from the Japanese, by Philip Gabriel.) Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day. E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share Tweet

Dale had been doing a lot of reading on Hellenic myth, so when he said he had a surprise for us at his Pumpkin Jamboree we knew he wasn’t screwing around. The jamboree—a weekend he organizes on his property to bring the town together and raise a little money for the Fire Department—features a hayride, face painting, and a cakewalk that occupies the entire side yard, but his corn maze tends to be the highlight. A crew of hard-core maze runners formed a line before he had even finished setting up. I deposited my five dollars in the bucket, like everyone else. “Only it isn’t a maze this time,” Dale said, arranging a last bale of hay around the pumpkins from the patch. “It’s a labyrinth.” A general murmur rose. A woman holding a whorl of candy floss wanted to know the distinction. “I’m glad you asked,” Dale said. “It’s largely the fact that the path is unicursal, not multicursal. There’s only one road, and it leads to only one place.” “There’s no point if you can’t get lost,” a townie said. He had a reputation for pulling girls into hidden corners of previous corn mazes and taking advantage of their confusion. “Also,” Dale said, “each of you has to go in alone.” A pretty girl was implausibly holding the townie’s hand. “It’s no fun alone!” she shouted. The high-school football coach took a knee to clutch his two boys to his chest. “My kids aren’t going in there by themselves.” Dale held the bucket away from folks reaching to take their money back. “Calm down,” he said. “Nobody has to go if they’d rather not. To be clear, the labyrinth is known to possess magic. Some say in the center you discover the one thing you most desire in the world. Others claim that God sits beyond the last bend. Individuals must find out for themselves. Go check out the jam contest if you’re not feeling up to it.” “There’s no way I’m going in there,” a fireman called out, a little drunk. The man was a guest of honor for the weekend and held some influence over the group, which began to turn away and head for the jamboree’s other attractions. The rope pull was always a favorite. Dale watched them leave, fingering a pumpkin’s thick stem and surely considering his hours of lost work. He starts his mazes a few months beforehand, cutting into the young corn when it’s tall but not yet sprouted, taking a pass first with the tractor and then with the riding mower to pull out the brace roots and tamp the corn down. He draws the maze plans on drafting paper and displays them afterward in his swept-out garage addition—he calls it the Hall of History—with other jamboree memorabilia: the gearshift from the original hayride truck, trotter prints from the winning pigs. We gather around to reminisce about which wrong turn we took and what was waiting for us on the other side. Knowing what he must have put into it, I thought it was a shame to stand by and see everyone go. The sun was still low in the sky, and it was lonely at home, where the TV had been broken for a week, and the tap water had begun to taste oddly of blood. “I’ll go first,” I said. “I’ll do it.” A few of the others halted their exodus. The pretty girl—whose name, I remembered, was Connie—let loose of the townie’s hand. Unfazed, he ambled off to do drugs behind the house. “That’s the spirit,” Dale said. “Jim will do it, everyone. He’ll start us off.” I shook my friend’s hand. “I know you worked hard on this maze, and I intend to take full advantage.” “It’s a labyrinth, but thanks. That’s the kind of pluck we’re known for around here.” Dale made a point of looking at the coach, who was still on one knee. Shamed, the man stood. “All right then,” I said, and made to get started, but Dale stopped me. He dug in a bag at his feet to extract a clay trivet, the type that allows a hot dish to sit on the dinner table. “You’ll need this,” he said. The trivet was etched with strange symbols. There were men or warriors and arrows and a shield and something that resembled the buttock of a woman. I became keenly aware that the others were crowding around to observe the etchings. The thing was in my hands now. “I don’t know about all this,” I said. “It’s the Phaistos Disk,” Dale said. “I paid a pretty penny, so mind where you set it.” It did seem to be imbued with some significance. “How’d you get that?” one of the women asked. He waved her off. “Let’s say I got lucky during a period of government oversight on the part of the Greeks. It puts a finishing touch on my project. Now, you go on, Jim. This is my life’s effort distilled. Find out what it’s all about.” It was a few degrees cooler inside the labyrinth, which imparted a sense of magic, though in truth it was only that I was shaded from the low sun by the corn. The soil smelled wet and new, and the path was wide and curved slightly to the right. Following its progress, I found that the bend continued for thirty feet before coming to a switchback. The stalks didn’t do much to block sound from outside the labyrinth, and it was possible to hear the others discussing the merits and folly of my decision. Buy the print » “You remember what he did on the hayride last year,” someone said. “Some asshole was screwing around and let his cigarette drop, started a fire in the hay right in front of a bunch of kids. Jim there took it upon himself to jump out of the truck and run for the fence. He didn’t come back, and so we put the fire out and went looking for him and when we found him, when we found—” As always, the tale drew some heavy laughter at this point. “That’s enough,” Dale said. “When we found him—” “Oh, my God,” a woman said, preëmptively, though at that point the story could have easily been finished in gesture. And so the shame of the fire gained purchase once again. You could live your whole life in the smallest town and never run out of an audience for a story like that. The trivet was a good weight, conducting my hands’ heat. It was further comforting to trace the etched shapes, settling a fingernail in the arc of a scythe or the buttock, which on closer inspection could just as easily have been a winding river, so simply was it carved. As I turned another switch, it became apparent that I had lost some sense of direction. The corn walls rustled. The voices faded, and the only sound was the incidental splash of the grouse pond on the far edge of Dale’s property. On I walked, holding the trivet to my chest. I wasn’t accustomed to carrying much of anything, and so the disk’s weight was fatiguing indeed. I made a sincere promise to myself to start up again with my dumbbells in the garage. The sun had begun to set, and a cool breeze filtered through the leaves. After another switch and twenty paces, the voices returned. “You’ve got to hand it to him for going in there alone,” a man said, the same one who had told the terrible story about me. “Maybe he has that adventuring spirit after all.” The surprise I felt at this praise stopped me, and I held my breath to listen, but there was no sound until I started up walking again. “He’s got balls,” said Dale, a true friend. “I never knew he was so brave,” a woman said. I stopped again and waited longer this time, counting out the seconds until I reached a minute, then three minutes, five, hearing only silence as if they had all of them lost interest and left. I took a step back in the direction I had come, but it felt as if I were pushing against a strong wind. The trivet was exerting a lateral pressure as if it were magnetized to the far horizon. Still I labored against it. The force nearly tipped me on my rear, causing me to experience a devastating vision of myself emerging from the labyrinth soaked down the back of my jeans, clocking in for another year of ridicule. And so I turned and continued into the labyrinth, at which point the conversation began again. “I’m proud to know him,” I heard Connie say. It was a thrilling statement, but I knew better than to stop and try to hear more. The journey was providing an immediate reward, and though I was panting and making noise with my heavy footfalls, the conversation seemed to grow louder as I got closer to the center. The voices were the equivalent of a compass star in the dusking sky. “He has a strong heart,” a man said. “I’m so proud of him,” Dale said. “Actually, I find him pretty handsome,” Connie added. Their voices buoyed me on, and I broke into a trot that carried me around the far side of the labyrinth, taking the turns without pause, drawn all the while by the trivet, which seemed towed on a wire. “I wish he’d come out here so I could shake his hand,” someone said wistfully, but there was no way to stop. The switches were coming faster now, and the path narrowed, as if Dale hadn’t quite figured out the proportions required. The corn’s soft tassels brushed my shoulders. I didn’t realize how exhausted I was until, turning the last corner, I found the center. The moon shone a straight beam into the clearing, which was about eight feet wide, with a depression in the dirt the size of a man. The trivet was straining toward the ditch. It took my whole strength to hold it back, and my strength was failing. But I had to keep it safe. Dale had given it to me with two hands, looking me in the eye. With the last of my power, I turned around, positioning myself between my burden and the hole. The trivet did its work from there, pushing me back and down, into the pit that seemed to have been dug to suit me, complete with a rise in the dirt for my neck and a uniform pile just below my feet. The trivet settled in the center of my sternum. It grew cold there and heavier than before, though I felt no desire to move from under its mass. I saw now that it was a stone like any other. I found that once I stopped struggling and held very still, barely breathing against its mass, I could hear the crowd again. They were telling stories of my heroism and bravery, of underwater rescue and diplomacy; tales I couldn’t remember being a part of, though surely I must have been involved in some way, if so many recalled them so fondly. Eventually, I did try to stand, at which point I understood the trouble. “Folks?” I said, quietly at first. “I think I got stuck on a root structure or something.” They continued their talk, which grew even grander than before. Someone brought out a guitar and began to improvise songs about my origin story. Born to a rancher just a little west of here / Jim raised his head and never cowered out of fear, went one line. My lungs strained to fill against the weight of the stone. “Dale?” I called out, gasping. “I need help. Can you bring a crowbar?” I was being driven down into the dirt as if by a machine press. The carved glyphs bit into my chest and branded my skin. I was alone. Then I met the Minotaur.

One gray November day, Elliot went to Boston for the afternoon. The wet streets seemed cold and lonely. He sensed a broken promise in the city’s elegance and verve. Old hopes tormented him like phantom limbs, but he did not drink. He had joined Alcoholics Anonymous fifteen months before. Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret. His wife went to Mass and cooked a turkey. Sober, Elliot walked in the woods. In January, blizzards swept down from the Arctic until the weather became too cold for snow. The Shawmut Valley grew quiet and crystalline. In the white silences, Elliot could hear the boards of his house contract and feel a shrinking in his bones. Each dusk, starveling deer came out of the wooded swamp behind the house to graze his orchard for whatever raccoons had uncovered and left behind. At night he lay beside his sleeping wife listening to the baying of dog packs running them down in the deep moon-shadowed snow. Day in, day out, he was sober. At times it was almost stimulating. But he could not shake off the sensations he had felt in Boston. In his mind’s eye he could see dead leaves rattling along brick gutters and savor that day’s desperation. The brief outing had undermined him. Sober, however, he remained, until the day a man named Blankenship came into his office at the state hospital for counselling. Blankenship had red hair, a brutal face, and a sneaking manner. He was a sponger and petty thief whom Elliot had seen a number of times before. “I been having this dream,” Blankenship announced loudly. His voice was not pleasant. His skin was unwholesome. Every time he got arrested the court sent him to the psychiatrists and the psychiatrists, who spoke little English, sent him to Elliot. Blankenship had joined the Army after his first burglary but had never served east of the Rhine. After a few months in Wiesbaden, he had been discharged for reasons of unsuitability, but he told everyone he was a veteran of the Vietnam War. He went about in a tiger suit. Elliot had had enough of him. “Dreams are boring,” Elliot told him. Blankenship was outraged. “Whaddaya mean?” he demanded. During counseling sessions Elliot usually moved his chair into the middle of the room in order to seem accessible to his clients. Now he stayed securely behind his desk. He did not care to seem accessible to Blankenship. “What I said, Mr. Blankenship. Other people’s dreams are boring. Didn’t you ever hear that?” “Boring?” Blankenship frowned. He seemed unable to imagine a meaning for the word. Elliot picked up a pencil and set its point quivering on his desk-top blotter. He gazed into his client’s slack-jawed face. The Blankenship family made their way through life as strolling litigants, and young Blankenship’s specialty was slipping on ice cubes. Hauled off the pavement, he would hassle the doctors in Emergency for pain pills and hurry to a law clinic. The Blankenships had threatened suit against half the property owners in the southern part of the state. What they could not extort at law they stole. But even the Blankenship family had abandoned Blankenship. His last visit to the hospital had been subsequent to subsequent an arrest for lifting a case of hot-dog rolls from Woolworth’s. He lived in a Goodwill depository bin in Wyndham. “Now I suppose you want to tell me your dream? Is that right, Mr. Blankenship?” Blankenship looked left and right like a dog surrendering eye contact. “Don’t you want to hear it?” he asked humbly. Elliot was unmoved. “Tell me something, Blankenship. Was your dream about Vietnam?“ At the mention of the word “Vietnam,” Blankenship customarily broke into a broad smile. Now he looked guilty and guarded. He shrugged. “Ya. “ “How come you have dreams about that place, Blankenship? You were never there. “ “Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship began to say, but Elliot cut him off. “You were never there, my man. You never saw the goddam place. You have no business dreaming about it! You better cut it out!” He had raised his voice to the extent that the secretary outside his open door paused at her word processor. “Lemme alone,” Blankenship said fearfully. “Some doctor you are.” “It’s all right,” Elliot assured him. “I’m not a doctor.” “Everybody’s on my case,” Blankenship said. His moods were volatile. He began to weep. Elliot watched the tears roll down Blankenship’s chapped, pitted cheeks. He cleared his throat. “Look, fella . . .” he began. He felt at a loss. He felt like telling Blankenship that things were tough all over. Blankenship sniffed and telescoped his neck and after a moment looked at Elliot. His look was disconcertingly trustful; he was used to being counselled. “Really, you know, it’s ridiculous for you to tell me your problems have to do with Nam. You were never over there. It was me over there, Blankenship. Not you.” Blankenship leaned forward and put his forehead on his knees. “Your troubles have to do with here and now,” Elliot told his client. “Fantasies aren’t helpful.” His voice sounded overripe and hypocritical in his own ears. What a dreadful business, he thought. What an awful job this is. Anger was driving him crazy. Blankenship straightened up and spoke through his tears. “This dream . . .” he said. “I’m scared.” Elliot felt ready to endure a great deal in order not to hear Blankenship’s dream. “I’m not the one you see about that,” he said. In the end he knew his duty. He sighed. “O.K. All right. Tell me about it.” “Yeah?” Blankenship asked with leaden sarcasm. “Yeah? You think dreams are friggin’ boring!” “No, no,” Elliot said. He offered Blankenship a tissue and Blankenship took one. “That was sort of off the top of my head. I didn’t really mean it. “ Blankenship fixed his eyes on dreaming distance. “There’s a feeling that goes with it. With the dream.” Then he shook his head in revulsion and looked at Elliot as though he had only just awakened. “So what do you think? You think it’s boring?” “Of course not,” Elliot said. “A physical feeling?” “Ya. It’s like I’m floating in rubber. “ He watched Elliot stealthily, aware of quickened attention. Elliot had caught dengue in Vietnam and during his weeks of delirium had felt vaguely as though he were floating in rubber. “What are you seeing in this dream?” Blankenship only shook his head. Elliot suffered a brief but intense attack of rage. “Hey, Blankenship,” he said equably, “here I am, man. You can see I’m listening. “ “What I saw was black,” Blankenship said. He spoke in an odd tremolo. His behavior was quite different from anything Elliot had come to expect from him. “Black? What was it?” “Smoke. The sky maybe.” “The sky?” Elliot asked. “It was all black. I was scared.” In a waking dream of his own, Elliot felt the muscles on his neck distend. He was looking up at a sky that was black, filled with smoke-swollen clouds, lit with fires, damped with blood and rain. “What were you scared of?” he asked Blankenship. “I don’t know,” Blankenship said. Elliot could not drive the black sky from his inward eye. It was as though Blankenship’s dream had infected his own mind. “You don’t know? You don’t know what you were scared of?” Blankenship’s posture was rigid. Elliot, who knew the aspect of true fear, recognized it there in front of him. “The Nam,” Blankenship said. “You‘re not even old enough,” Elliot told him. Blankenship sat trembling with joined palms between his thighs. His face was flushed and not in the least ennobled by pain. He had trouble with alcohol and drugs. He had trouble with everything. “So wherever your black sky is, it isn’t Vietnam.” Things were so unfair, Elliot thought. It was unfair of Blankenship to appropriate the condition of a Vietnam veteran. The trauma inducing his post-traumatic stress had been nothing more serious than his own birth, a routine procedure. Now, in addition to the poverty, anxiety, and confusion that would always be his life’s lot, he had been visited with irony. It was all arbitrary and some people simply got elected. Everyone knew that who had been where Blankenship had not. “Because, I assure you, Mr. Blankenship, you were never there.” “Whaddaya mean?” Blankenship asked. When Blankenship was gone, Elliot leafed through his file and saw that the psychiatrists had passed him upstairs without recording a diagnosis. Disproportionately angry, he went out to the secretary’s desk. “Nobody wrote up that last patient,” he said. “I’m not supposed to see people without a diagnosis. The shrinks are just passing the buck.” The secretary was a tall, solemn redhead with prominent front teeth and a slight speech disorder. “Dr. Sayyid will have kittens if he hears you call him a shrink, Chas. He’s already complained. He hates being called a shrink. “ “Then he came to the wrong country,” Elliot said. “He can go back to his own.” The woman giggled. “He is the doctor, Chas.” “Hates being called a shrink!” He threw the file on the secretary’s table and stormed back toward his office. “That fucking little zip couldn’t give you a decent haircut. He’s a prescription clerk.” The secretary looked about her guiltily and shook her head. She was used to him. Elliot succeeded in calming himself down after a while, but the image of black sky remained with him. At first he thought he would be able to simply shrug the whole thing off. After a few minutes, he picked up his phone and dialled Blankenship’s probation officer. “The Vietnam thing is all he has,” the probation officer explained. “I guess he picked it up around.” “His descriptions are vivid,” Elliot said. “You mean they sound authentic?” “I mean he had me going today. He was ringing my bells.” “Good for Blanky. Think he believes it himself?” “Yes,” Elliot said. “He believes it himself now.” Elliot told the probation officer about Blankenship’s current arrest, which was for showering illegally at midnight in the Wyndham Regional High School. He asked what Probation knew about Blankenship’s present relationship with his family. “You kiddin’?” the P.O. asked. “They’re all locked down. The whole family’s inside. The old man’s in Bridgewater. Little Donny’s in San Quentin or somewhere. Their dog’s in the pound.” Elliot had lunch alone in the hospital staff cafeteria. On the far side of the double-glazed windows, the day was darkening as an expected snowstorm gathered. Along Route 7, ancient elms stood frozen against the gray sky. When he had finished his sandwich and coffee, he sat staring out at the winter afternoon. His anger had given way to an insistent anxiety. On the way back to his office, he stopped at the hospital gift shop for a copy of Sports Illustrated and a candy bar. When he was inside again, he closed the door and put his feet up. It was Friday and he had no appointments for the remainder of the day, nothing to do but write a few letters and read the office mail. Elliot’s cubicle in the social-services department was windowless and lined with bookshelves. When he found himself unable to concentrate on the magazine and without any heart for his paperwork, he ran his eye over the row of books beside his chair. There were volumes by Heinrich Muller and Carlos Casteneda, Jones’ life of Freud, and “The Golden Bough.” The books aroused a revulsion in Elliot. Their present uselessness repelled him. Over and over again, detail by detail, he tried to recall his conversation with Blankenship. “You were never there,” he heard himself explaining. He was trying to get the whole incident straightened out after the fact. Something was wrong. Dread crept over him like a paralysis. He ate his candy bar without tasting it. He knew that the craving for sweets was itself a bad sign. Blankenship had misappropriated someone else’s dream and made it his own. It made no difference whether you had been there, after all. The dreams had crossed the ocean. They were in the air. He took his glasses off and put them on his desk and sat with his arms folded, looking into the well of light from his desk lamp. There seemed to be nothing but whirl inside him. Unwelcome things came and went in his mind’s eye. His heart beat faster. He could not control the headlong promiscuity of his thoughts. It was possible to imagine larval dreams travelling in suspended animation undetectable in a host brain. They could be divided and regenerate like flatworms, hide in seams and bedding, in war stories, laughter, snapshots. They could rot your socks and turn your memory into a black-and-green blister. Green for the hills, black for the sky above. At daybreak they hung themselves up in rows like bats. At dusk they went out to look for dreamers. Elliot put his jacket on and went into the outer office, where the secretary sat frowning into the measured sound and light of her machine. She must enjoy its sleekness and order, he thought. She was divorced. Four redheaded kids between ten and seventeen lived with her in an unpainted house across from Stop & Shop. Elliot liked her and had come to find her attractive. He managed a smile for her. “Ethel, I think I’m going to pack it in,” he declared. It seemed awkward to be leaving early without a reason. “Jack wants to talk to you before you go, Chas.” Elliot looked at her blankly. Then his colleague, Jack Sprague, having heard his voice, called from the adjoining cubicle. “Chas, what about Sunday’s games? Shall I call you with the spread?” “I don’t know,” Elliot said. “I’ll phone you tomorrow.” “This is a big decision for him,” Jack Sprague told the secretary. “He might lose twenty-five bucks.” At present, Elliot drew a slightly higher salary than Jack Sprague, although Jack had a Ph.D. and Elliot was simply an M.S.W. Different branches of the state government employed them. “Twenty-five bucks,” said the woman. “If you guys have no better use for twenty-five bucks, give it to me. “ “Where are you off to, by the way?” Sprague asked. Elliot began to answer, but for a moment no reply occurred to him. He shrugged. “I have to get back,” he finally stammered. “I promised Grace.” “Was that Blankenship I saw leaving?” Elliot nodded. “It’s February,” Jack said. “How come he’s not in Florida?” “I don’t know,” Elliot said. He put on his coat and walked to the door. “I’ll see you.” “Have a nice weekend,” the secretary said. She and Sprague looked after him indulgently as he walked toward the main corridor. “Are Chas and Grace going out on the town?” she said to Sprague. “What do you think?” “That would be the day,” Sprague said. “Tomorrow he’ll come back over here and read all day. He spends every weekend holed up in this goddam office while she does something or other at the church.” He shook his head. “Every night he’s at A.A. and she’s home alone.” Ethel savored her overbite. “Jack,” she said teasingly, “are you thinking what I think you’re thinking? Shame on you.” “I’m thinking I’m glad I’m not him, that’s what I’m thinking. That’s as much as I’ll say.” “Yeah, well, I don’t care,” Ethel said. “Two salaries and no kids, that’s the way to go, boy.” Elliot went out through the automatic doors of the emergency bay and the cold closed over him. He walked across the hospital parking lot with his eyes on the pavement, his hands thrust deep in his overcoat pockets, skirting patches of shattered ice. There was no wind, but the motionless air stung; the metal frames of his glasses burned his skin. Curlicues of mud-brown ice coated the soiled snowbanks along the street. Although it was still afternoon, the street lights had come on. The lock on his car door had frozen and he had to breathe on the keyhole to fit the key. When the engine turned over, Jussi Björling’s recording of the Handel Largo filled the car interior. He snapped it off at once. Halted at the first stoplight, he began to feel the want of a destination. The fear and impulse to flight that had got him out of the office faded, and he had no desire to go home. He was troubled by a peculiar impatience that might have been with time itself. It was as though he were waiting for something. The sensation made him feel anxious; it was unfamiliar but not altogether unpleasant. When the light changed he drove on, past the Gulf station and the firehouse and between the greens of Ilford Common At the far end of the common he swung into the parking lot of the Packard Conway Library and stopped with the engine running. What he was experiencing, he thought, was the principle of possibility. He turned off the engine and went out again into the cold. Behind the leaded library windows he could see the librarian pouring coffee in her tiny private office. The librarian was a Quaker of socialist principles named Candace Music, who was Elliot’s cousin. The Conway Library was all dark wood and etched mirrors, a Gothic saloon. Years before, out of work and booze-whipped, Elliot had gone to hide there. Because Candace was a classicist’s widow and knew some Greek, she was one of the few people in the valley with whom Elliot had cared to speak in those days. Eventually, it had seemed to him that all their conversations tended toward Vietnam, so he had gone less and less often. Elliot was the only Vietnam veteran Candace knew well enough to chat with, and he had come to suspect that he was being probed for the edification of the East Ilford Friends Meeting. At that time he had still pretended to talk easily about his war and had prepared little discourses and picaresque anecdotes to recite on demand. Earnest seekers like Candace had caused him great secret distress. Candace came out of her office to find him at the checkout desk. He watched her brow furrow with concern as she composed a smile. “Chas, what a surprise. You haven’t been in for an age.” “Sure I have, Candace. I went to all the Wednesday films last fall. I work just across the road.” “I know, dear,” Candace said. “I always seem to miss you.” A cozy fire burned in the hearth, an antique brass clock ticked along on the marble mantel above it. On a couch near the fireplace an old man sat upright, his mouth open, asleep among half a dozen soiled plastic bags. Two teen-age girls whispered over their homework at a table under the largest window. “Now that I’m here” he said, laughing, “I can’t remember what I came to get.” “Stay and get warm,” Candace told him. “Got a minute? Have a cup of coffee. “ Elliot had nothing but time, but he quickly realized that he did not want to stay and pass it with Candace. He had no clear idea of why he had come to the library. Standing at the checkout desk, he accepted coffee. She attended him with an air of benign supervision, as though he were a Chinese peasant and she a medical missionary, like her father. Candace was tall and plain, more handsome in her middle sixties than she had ever been. “Why don’t we sit down?” He allowed her to gentle him into a chair by the fire. They made a threesome with the sleeping old man. “Have you given up translating, Chas? I hope not.” “Not at all,” he said. Together they had once rendered a few fragments of Sophocles into verse. She was good at clever rhymes. “You come in so rarely, Chas. Ted’s books go to waste.” After her husband’s death, Candace had donated his books to the Conway, where they reposed in a reading room inscribed to his memory, untouched among foreign-language volumes, local genealogies, and books in large type for the elderly. “I have a study in the barn,” he told Candace. “I work there. When I have time.” The lie was absurd, but he felt the need of it. “And you’re working with Vietnam veterans,” Candace declared. “Supposedly,” Elliot said. He was growing impatient with her nodding solicitude. “Actually,” he said, “I came in for the new Oxford ‘Classical World.’ I thought you’d get it for the library and I could have a look before I spent my hard-earned cash.” Candace beamed. “You’ve come to the right place, Chas, I’m happy to say.” He thought she looked disproportionately happy. “I have it.” “Good,” Elliot said, standing. “I’ll just take it, then. I can’t really stay.” Candace took his cup and saucer and stood as he did. When the library telephone rang, she ignored it, reluctant to let him go. “How’s Grace?” she asked. “Fine,” Elliot said, “Grace is well. “ At the third ring she went to the desk. When her back was turned, he hesitated for a moment and then went outside. The gray afternoon had softened into night, and it was snowing. The falling snow whirled like a furious mist in the headlight beams on Route 7 and settled implacably on Elliot’s cheeks and eyelids. His heart, for no good reason, leaped up in childlike expectation. He had run away from a dream and encountered possibility. He felt in possession of a promise. He began to walk toward the roadside lights. Only gradually did he begin to understand what had brought him there and what the happy anticipation was that fluttered in his breast. Drinking, he had started his evenings from the Conway Library. He would arrive hung over in the early afternoon to browse and read. When the old pain rolled in with dusk, he would walk down to the Midway Tavern for a remedy. Standing in the snow outside the library, he realized that he had contrived to promise himself a drink. Ahead, through the storm, he could see the beer signs in the Midway’s window warm and welcoming. Snowflakes spun around his head like an excitement. Outside the Midway’s package store, he paused with his hand on the doorknob. There was an old man behind the counter whom Elliot remembered from his drinking days. When he was inside, he realized that the old man neither knew nor cared who he was. The package store was thick with dust; it was on the counter, the shelves, the bottles themselves. The old counterman looked dusty. Elliot bought a bottle of King William Scotch and put it in the inside pocket of his overcoat. Passing the windows of the Midway Tavern Elliot could see the ranks of bottles aglow behind the bar. The place was crowded with men leaving the afternoon shifts at the shoe and felt factories. No one turned to note him when he passed inside. There was a single stool vacant at the bar and he took it. His heart beat faster. Bruce Springsteen was on the jukebox. The bartender was a club fighter from Pittsfield called Jackie G., with whom Elliot had often gossiped. Jackie G. greeted him as though he had been in the previous evening. “Say, babe?” “How do,” Elliot said. A couple of the men at the bar eyed his shirt and tie. Confronted with the bartender, he felt impelled to explain his presence. “Just thought I’d stop by,” he told Jackie G. “Just thought I’d have one. Saw the light. The snow . . .” He chuckled expansively. “Good move,” the bartender said. “Scotch?“ “Double,” Elliot said. When he shoved two dollars forward along the bar, Jackie G. pushed one of the bills back to him. “Happy hour, babe.” “Ah,” Elliot said. He watched Jackie pour the double. “Not a moment too soon.” For five minutes or so, Elliot sat in his car in the barn with the engine running and his Handel tape on full volume. He had driven over from East Ilford in a Baroque ecstasy, swinging and swaying and singing along. When the tape ended, he turned off the engine and poured some Scotch into an apple-juice container to store providentially beneath the car seat. Then he took the tape and the Scotch into the house with him. He was lying on the sofa in the dark living room, listening to the Largo, when he heard his wife’s car in the driveway. By the time Grace had made her way up the icy back-porch steps, he was able to hide the Scotch and rinse his glass clean in the kitchen sink. The drinking life, he thought, was lived moment by moment. Soon she was in the tiny cloakroom struggling off with her overcoat. In the process she knocked over a cross-country ski, which stood propped against the cloakroom wall. It had been more than a year since Elliot had used the skis. She came into the kitchen and sat down at the table to take off her boots. Her lean, freckled face was flushed with the cold, but her eyes looked weary. “I wish you’d put those skis down in the barn,” she told him. “You never use them.” “I always like to think,” Elliot said, “that I’ll start the morning off skiing. “ “Well, you never do,” she said. “How long have you been home?” “Practically just walked in,” he said. Her pointing out that he no longer skied in the morning enraged him. “I stopped at the Conway Library to get the new Oxford ‘Classical World.’ Candace ordered it.” Her look grew troubled. She had caught something in his voice. With dread and bitter satisfaction, Elliot watched his wife detect the smell of whiskey. “Oh God,” she said. “I don’t believe it.” Let’s get it over with, he thought. Let’s have the song and dance. She sat up straight in her chair and looked at him in fear. “Oh, Chas,” she said, “how could you?” For a moment he was tempted to try to explain it all. “The fact is,” Elliot told his wife, “I hate people who start the day cross-country skiing.” She shook her head in denial and leaned her forehead on her palm and cried. He looked into the kitchen window and saw his own distorted image. “The fact is I think I’ll start tomorrow morning by stringing head-high razor wire across Anderson’s trail.” The Andersons were the Elliots’ nearest neighbors. Loyall Anderson was a full professor of government at the state university, thirty miles away. Anderson and his wife were blond and both of them were over six feet tall. They had two blond children, who qualified for the gifted class in the local school but attended regular classes in token of the Andersons’ opposition to élitism. “Sure,” Elliot said. “Stringing wire’s good exercise. It’s life-affirming in its own way.” The Andersons started each and every day with a brisk morning glide along a trail that they partly maintained. They skied well and presented a pleasing, wholesome sight. If, in the course of their adventure, they encountered a snowmobile, Darlene Anderson would affect to choke and cough, indicating her displeasure. If the snowmobile approached them from behind and the trail was narrow, the Andersons would decline to let it pass, asserting their statutory right-of-way. “I don’t want to hear your violent fantasies,” Grace said. Elliot was picturing razor wire, the Army kind. He was picturing the decapitated Andersons, their blood and jaunty ski caps bright on the white trail. He was picturing their severed heads, their earnest blue eyes and large white teeth reflecting the virginal morning snow. Although Elliot hated snowmobiles, he hated the Andersons far more. He looked at his wife and saw that she had stopped crying. Her long, elegant face was rigid and lipless. “Know what I mean? One string at Mommy and Daddy level for Loyall and Darlene. And a bitty wee string at kiddie level for Skippy and Samantha, those cunning little whizzes.” “Stop it,” she said to him. “Sorry,” Elliot told her. Stiff with shame, he went and took his bottle out of the cabinet into which he had thrust it and poured a drink. He was aware of her eyes on him. As he drank, a fragment from old Music’s translation of “Medea” came into his mind. “Old friend, I have to weep. The gods and I went mad together and made things as they are.” It was such a waste; eighteen months of struggle thrown away. But there was no way to get the stuff back in the bottle. “I’m very sorry,” he said. “You know I’m very sorry, don’t you, Grace?” The delectable Handel arias spun on in the next room. “You must stop,” she said. “You must make yourself stop before it takes over.” “It’s out of my hands,” Elliot said. He showed her his empty hands. “It’s beyond me.” “You’ll lose your Job, Chas.” She stood up at the table and leaned on it, staring wide-eyed at him. Drunk as he was, the panic in her voice frightened him. “You’ll end up in jail again.” “One engages,” Elliot said, “and then one sees.” “How can you have done it?” she demanded. “You promised me.” “First the promises,” Elliot said, “and then the rest.” “Last time was supposed to be the last time,” she said. “Yes,” he said, “I remember.” “I can’t stand it,” she said. “You reduce me to hysterics.” She wrung her hands for him to see. “See? Here I am, I’m in hysterics.” “What can I say?” Elliot asked. He went to the bottle and refilled his glass. “Maybe you shouldn’t watch.” “You want me to be forbearing, Chas? I’m not going to be.” “The last thing I want,” Elliot said, “is an argument.” “I’ll give you a fucking argument. You didn’t have drink. All you had to do was come home.” “That must have been the problem,” he said. Then he ducked, alert at the last possible second to the missile that came for him at hairline level. Covering up, he heard the shattering of glass, and a fine rain of crystals enveloped him. She had sailed the sugar bowl at him; it had smashed against the wall above his head and there was sugar and glass in his hair. “You bastard!” she screamed. “You are undermining me!” “You ought not to throw things at me,” Elliot said. “I don’t throw things at you.” He left her frozen into her follow-through and went into the living room to turn the music off. When he returned she was leaning back against the wall, rubbing her right elbow with her left hand. Her eyes were bright. She had picked up one of her boots from the middle of the kitchen floor and stood holding it. “What the hell do you mean, that must have been the problem?” He set his glass on the edge of the sink with an unsteady hand and turned to her. “What do I mean? I mean that most of the time I’m putting one foot in front of the other like a good soldier and I’m out of it from the neck up. But there are times when I don’t think I will ever be dead enough — or dead long enough — to get the taste of this life off my teeth. That’s what I mean!” She looked at him dry-eyed. “Poor fella,” she said. “What you have to understand, Grace, is that this drink I’m having” — he raised the glass toward her in a gesture of salute –”is the only worthwhile thing I’ve done in the last year and a half. It’s the only thing in my life that means jack shit, the closest thing to satisfaction I’ve had. Now how can you begrudge me that? It’s the best I’m capable of.” “You’ll go too far,” she said to him. “You’ll see.” “What’s that, Grace? A threat to walk?” He was grinding his teeth. “Don’t make me laugh. You, walk? You, the friend of the unfortunate?” “Don’t you hit me,” she said when she looked at his face. “Don’t you dare.“ “You, the Christian Queen of Calvary, walk? Why, I don’t believe that for a minute.” She ran a hand through her hair and bit her lip. “No, we stay,” she said. Anger and distraction made her look young. Her cheeks blazed rosy against the general pallor of her skin. “In my family we stay until the fell a dies. That’s the tradition. We stay and pour it for them and they die.” He put his drink down and shook his head. “I thought we’d come through,” Grace said. “I was sure.” “No,” Elliot said. “Not altogether.” They stood in silence for a minute. Elliot sat down at the oilcloth-covered table. Grace walked around it and poured herself a whiskey. “You are undermining me, Chas. You are making things impossible for me and I just don’t know.” She drank and winced. “I’m not going to stay through another drunk. I’m telling you right now. I haven’t got it in me. I’ll die.” He did not want to look at her. He watched the flakes settle against the glass of the kitchen door. “Do what you feel the need of,” he said. “I just can’t take it,” she said. Her voice was not scolding but measured and reasonable. “It’s February. And I went to court this morning and lost Vopotik.” Once again, he thought, my troubles are going to be obviated by those of the deserving poor. He said, “Which one was that?” “Don’t you remember them? The three-year-old with the broken fingers?” He shrugged. Grace sipped her whiskey. “I told you. I said I had a three-year-old with broken fingers, and you said, ‘Maybe he owed somebody money.’ ” “Yes,” he said, “I remember now.” “You ought to see the Vopotiks, Chas. The woman is young and obese. She’s so young that for a while I thought I could get to her as a juvenile. The guy is a biker. They believe the kid came from another planet to control their lives. They believe this literally, both of them.” “You shouldn’t get involved that way,” Elliot said. “You should leave it to the caseworkers.” “They scared their first caseworker all the way to California. They were following me to work.” “You didn’t tell me.” “Are you kidding?” she asked. “Of course I didn’t.” To Elliot’s surprise, his wife poured herself a second whiskey. “You know how they address the child? As ‘dude.’ She says to it, ‘Hey, dude.’“ Grace shuddered with loathing. “You can’t imagine! The woman munching Twinkies. The kid smelling of shit. They’re high morning, noon, and night, but you can’t get anybody for that these days.” “People must really hate it,” Elliot said, “when somebody tells them they’re not treating their kids right.” “They definitely don’t want to hear it,” Grace said. “You’re right.” She sat stirring her drink, frowning into the glass. “The Vopotik child will die, I think.” “Surely not,” Elliot said. “This one I think will die,” Grace said. She took a deep breath and puffed out her cheeks and looked at him forlornly. “The situation’s extreme. Of course, sometimes you wonder whether it makes any difference. That’s the big question, isn’t it?” “I would think,” Elliot said, “that would be the one question you didn’t ask. “ “But you do,” she said. “You wonder: Ought they to live at all? To continue the cycle?” She put a hand to her hair and shook her head as if in confusion. “Some of these folks, my God, the poor things cannot put Wednesday on top of Tuesday to save their lives.” “It’s a trick,” Elliot agreed, “a lot of them can’t manage.” “And kids are small, they’re handy and underfoot. They make noise. They can’t hurt you back.” “I suppose child abuse is something people can do together,” Elliot said. “Some kids are obnoxious. No question about it.” “I wouldn’t know,” Elliot said. “Maybe you should stop complaining. Maybe you’re better off. Maybe your kids are better off unborn.” “Better off or not,” Elliot said, “it looks like they’ll stay that way.” “I mean our kids, of course,” Grace said. “I’m not blaming you, understand? It’s just that here we are with you drunk again and me losing Vopotik, so I thought why not get into the big unaskable questions.” She got up and folded her arms and began to pace up and down the kitchen. “Oh,” she said when her eye fell upon the bottle, “that’s good stuff, Chas. You won’t mind if I have another? I’ll leave you enough to get loaded on.” Elliot watched her pour. So much pain, he thought; such anger and confusion. He was tired of pain, anger, and confusion; they were what had got him in trouble that very morning. The liquor seemed to be giving him a perverse lucidity when all he now lucidity required was oblivion. His rage, especially, was intact in its salting of alcohol. Its contours were palpable and bleeding at the borders. Booze was good for rage. Booze could keep it burning through the darkest night. “What happened in court?” he asked his wife. She was leaning on one arm against the wall, her long, strong body flexed at the hip. Holding her glass, she stared angrily toward the invisible fields outside. “I lost the child,” she said. Elliot thought that a peculiar way of putting it. He said nothing. “The court convened in an atmosphere of high hilarity. It may be Hate Month around here but it was buddy-buddy over at Ilford Courthouse. The room was full of bikers and bikers’ lawyers. A colorful crowd. There was a lot of bonding.” She drank and shivered. “They didn’t think too well of me. They don’t think too well of broads as lawyers. Neither does the judge. The judge has the common touch. He’s one of the boys.” “Which judge?” Elliot asked. “Buckley. A man of about sixty. Know him? Lots of veins on his nose?“ Elliot shrugged. “I thought I had done my homework,” Grace told him. “But suddenly I had nothing but paper. No witnesses. It was Margolis at Valley Hospital who spotted the radiator burns. He called us in the first place. Suddenly he’s got to keep his reservation for a campsite in St. John. So Buckley threw his deposition out.” She began to chew on a fingernail. “The caseworkers have vanished – one’s in L.A., the other’s in Nepal. I went in there and got run over. I lost the child.” “It happens all the time,” Elliot said. “Doesn’t it?” “This one shouldn’t have been lost, Chas. These people aren’t simply confused. They’re weird. They stink.“ “You go messing into anybody’s life,” Elliot said, “that’s what you’ll find.” “If the child stays in that house,” she said, “he’s going to die.” “You did your best,” he told his wife. “Forget it.” She pushed the bottle away. She was holding a water glass that was almost a third full of whiskey. “That’s what the commissioner said.” Elliot was thinking of how she must have looked in court to the cherry-faced judge and the bikers and their lawyers. Like the schoolteachers who had tormented their childhoods, earnest and tight-assed, humorless and self-righteous. It was not surprising that things had gone against her. He walked over to the window and faced his reflection again. “Your optimism always surprises me.” “My optimism? Where I grew up our principal cultural expression was the funeral. Whatever keeps me going, it isn’t optimism.” “No?” he asked. “What is it?” “I forget,” she said. “Maybe it’s your religious perspective. Your sense of the divine plan.” She sighed in exasperation. “Look, I don’t think I want to fight anymore. I’m sorry I threw the sugar at you. I’m not your keeper. Pick on someone your own size.” “Sometimes,” Elliot said, “I try to imagine what it’s like to believe that the sky is full of care and concern.” “You want to take everything from me, do you?” She stood leaning against the back of her chair. “That you can’t take. It’s the only part of my life you can’t mess up.” He was thinking that if it had not been for her he might not have survived. There could be no forgiveness for that. “Your life? You’ve got all this piety strung out between Monadnock and Central America. And look at yourself. Look at your life.” “Yes,” she said, “look at it.” “You should have been a nun. You don’t know how to live.” “I know that,” she said. “That’s why I stopped doing counselling. Because I’d rather talk the law than life.” She turned to him. “You got everything I had, Chas. What’s left I absolutely require.” “I swear I would rather be a drunk,” Elliot said, “than force myself to believe such trivial horseshit.” “Well, you’re going to have to do it without a straight man,” she said, “because this time I’m not going to be here for you. Believe it or not.” “I don’t believe it,” Elliot said. “Not my Grace.” “You’re really good at this,” she told him. “You make me feel ashamed of my own name.” “I love your name,” he said. The telephone rang. They let it ring three times, and then Elliot went over and answered it. “Hey, who’s that?” a good-humored voice on the phone demanded. Elliot recited their phone number. “Hey, I want to talk to your woman, man. Put her on.” “I’ll give her a message,” Elliot said. “You put your woman on, man. Run and get her.” Elliott looked at the receiver. He shook his head. “Mr. Vopotik?” “Never you fuckin’ mind, man. I don’t want to talk to you. I want to talk to the skinny bitch.” Elliot hung up. “Is it him?” she asked. “I guess so.” They waited for the phone to ring again and it shortly did. “I’ll talk to him,” Grace said. But Elliot already had the phone. “Who are you, asshole?” the voice inquired. “What’s your fuckin’ name, man? “ “Elliot,” Elliot said. “Hey, don’t hang up on me, Elliot. I won’t put up with that. I told you go get that skinny bitch, man. You go do it.“ There were sounds of festivity in the background on the other end of the line-a stereo and drunken voices. “Hey,” the voice declared. “Hey, don’t keep me waiting, man.” “What do you want to say to her?” Elliot asked. “That’s none of your fucking business, fool. Do what I told you.” “My wife is resting,” Elliot said. “I’m taking her calls.” He was answered by a shout of rage. He put the phone aside for a moment and finished his glass of whiskey. When he picked it up again the man on the line was screaming at him. “That bitch tried to break up my family, man! She almost got away with it. You know what kind of pain my wife went through?” “What kind?” Elliot asked. For a few seconds he heard only the noise of the party. “Hey, you’re not drunk, are you, fella?” “Certainly not,” Elliot insisted. “You tell that skinny bitch she’s gonna pay for what she did to my family, man. You tell her she can run but she can’t hide. I don’t care where you go — California, anywhere — I’ll get to you.” “Now that I have you on the phone,” Elliot said, “I’d like to ask you a couple of questions. Promise you won’t get mad?” “Stop it!” Grace said to him. She tried to wrench the phone from his grasp, but he clutched it to his chest. “Do you keep a journal?” Elliot asked the man on the phone. “What’s your hat size?” “Maybe you think I can’t get to you,” the man said. “But I can get to you, man. I don’t care who you are, I’ll get to you. The brothers will get to you.” “Well, there’s no need to go to California. You know where we live.” “For God’s sake,” Grace said. “Fuckin’ right,” the man on the telephone said. “Fuckin’ right I know. “ “Come on over,” Elliot said. “How’s that?” the man on the phone asked. “I said come on over. We’ll talk about space travel. Comets and stuff. We’ll talk astral projection. The moons of Jupiter.” “You’re making a mistake, fucker.” “Come on over,” Elliot insisted. “Bring your fat wife and your beat-up kid. Don’t be embarrassed if your head’s a little small.” The telephone was full of music and shouting. Elliot held it away from his ear. “Good work,” Grace said to him when he had replaced the receiver. “I hope he comes,” Elliot said. “I’ll pop him.” He went carefully down the cellar stairs, switched on the overhead light, and began searching among the spiderwebbed shadows and fouled fishing line for his shotgun. It took him fifteen minutes to find it and his cleaning case. While he was still downstairs, he heard the telephone ring again and his wife answer it. He came upstairs and spread his shooting gear across the kitchen table. “Was that him?“ She nodded wearily. “He called back to play us the chain saw.” “I’ve heard that melody before,” Elliot said. He assembled his cleaning rod and swabbed out the shotgun barrel. Grace watched him, a hand to her forehead. “God,” she said. “What have I done? I’m so drunk.” “Most of the time,” Elliot said, sighting down the barrel, “I’m helpless in the face of human misery. Tonight I’m ready to reach out.” “I’m finished,” Grace said. “I’m through, Chas. I mean it.” Elliot rammed three red shells into the shotgun and pumped one forward into the breech with a satisfying report. “Me, I’m ready for some radical problem-solving. I’m going to spray that no-neck Slovak allover the yard.” “He isn’t a Slovak,” Grace said. She stood in the middle of the kitchen with her eyes closed. Her face was chalk white. “What do you mean?” Elliot demanded. “Certainly he’s a Slovak.” “No he’s not,” Grace said. “Fuck him anyway. I don’t care what he is. I’ll grease his ass.” He took a handful of deer shells from the box and stuffed them in his jacket pockets. “I’m not going to stay with you, Chas. Do you understand me?” Elliot walked to the window and peered out at his driveway. “He won’t be alone. They travel in packs.” “For God’s sake!” Grace cried, and in the next instant bolted for the downstairs bathroom. Elliot went out, turned off the porch light and switched on a spotlight over the barn door. Back inside, he could hear Grace in the toilet being sick. He turned off the light in the kitchen. He was still standing by the window when she came up behind him. It seemed strange and fateful to be standing in the dark near her, holding the shotgun. He felt ready for anything. “I can’t leave you alone down here drunk with a loaded shotgun,” she said. “How can I?” “Go upstairs,” he said. “If I went upstairs it would mean I didn’t care what happened. Do you understand? If I go it means I don’t care anymore. Understand?” “Stop asking me if I understand,” Elliot said. “I understand fine.” “I can’t think,” she said in a sick voice. “Maybe I don’t care. I don’t know. I’m going upstairs.” “Good,” Elliot said. When she was upstairs, Elliot took his shotgun and the whiskey into the dark living room and sat down in an armchair beside one of the lace-curtained windows. The powerful barn light illuminated the length of his driveway and the whole of the back yard. From the window at which he sat, he commanded a view of several miles in the direction of East IIford. The two-lane blacktop road that ran there was the only one along which an enemy could pass. He drank and watched the snow, toying with the safety of his 12-gauge Remington. He felt neither anxious nor angry now but only impatient to be done with whatever the night would bring. Drunkenness and the silent rhythm of the falling snow combined to make him feel outside of time and syntax. Sitting in the dark room, he found himself confronting Blankenship’s dream. He saw the bunkers and wire of some long-lost perimeter. The rank smell of night came back to him, the dread evening and quick dusk, the mysteries of outer darkness: fear, combat, and death. Enervated by liquor, he began to cry. Elliot was sympathetic with other people’s tears but ashamed of his own. He thought of his own tears as childish and excremental. He stifled whatever it was that had started them. Now his whiskey tasted thin as water. Beyond the lightly frosted glass, illuminated snowflakes spun and settled sleepily on weighted pine boughs. He had found a life beyond the war after all, but in it he was still sitting in darkness, armed, enraged, waiting. His eyes grew heavy as the snow came down. He felt as though he could be drawn up into the storm and he began to imagine that. He imagined his life with all its artifacts and appetites easing up the spout into white oblivion, everything obviated and foreclosed. He thought maybe he could go for that. When he awakened, his left hand had gone numb against the trigger guard of his shotgun. The living room was full of pale, delicate light. He looked outside and saw that the storm was done with and the sky radiant and cloudless. The sun was still below the horizon. Slowly Elliot got to his feet. The throbbing poison in his limbs served to remind him of the state of things. He finished the glass of whiskey on the windowsill beside his easy chair. Then he went to the hall closet to get a ski jacket, shouldered his shotgun, and went outside. There were two cleared acres behind his house; beyond them a trail descended into a hollow of pine forest and frozen swamp. Across the hollow, white pastures stretched to the ridgeline, lambent under the lightening sky. A line of skeletal elms weighted with snow marked the course of frozen Shawmut Brook. He found a pair of ski goggles in a jacket pocket and put them on and set out toward the tree line, gripping the shotgun, step by careful step in the knee-deep snow. Two raucous crows wheeled high overhead, their cries exploding the morning’s silence. When the sun came over the ridge, he stood where he was and took in a deep breath. The risen sun warmed his face and he closed his eyes. It was windless and very cold. Only after he had stood there for a while did he realize how tired he had become. The weight of the gun taxed him. It seemed infinitely wearying to contemplate another single step in the snow. He opened his eyes and closed them again. With sunup the world had gone blazing blue and white, and even with his tinted goggles its whiteness dazzled him and made his head ache. Behind his eyes, the hypnagogic patterns formed a monsoon-heavy tropical sky. He yawned. More than anything, he wanted to lie down in the soft, pure snow. If he could do that, he was certain he could go to sleep at once. He stood in the middle of the field and listened to the crows. Fear, anger, and sleep were the three primary conditions of life. He had learned that over there. Once he had thought fear the worst, but he had learned that the worst was anger. Nothing could fix it; neither alcohol nor medicine. It was a worm. It left him no peace. Sleep was the best. He opened his eyes and pushed on until he came to the brow that overlooked the swamp. Just below, gliding along among the frozen cattails and bare scrub maple, was a man on skis. Elliot stopped to watch the man approach. The skier’s face was concealed by a red-and-blue ski mask. He wore snow goggles, a blue jumpsuit, and a red woollen Norwegian hat. As he came, he leaned into the turns of the trail, moving silently and gracefully along. At the foot of the slope on which Elliot stood, the man looked up, saw him, and slid to a halt. The man stood staring at him for a moment and then began to herringbone up the slope. In no time at all the skier stood no more than ten feet away, removing his goggles, and inside the woollen mask Elliot recognized the clear blue eyes of his neighbor, Professor Loyall Anderson. The shotgun Elliot was carrying seemed to grow heavier. He yawned and shook his head, trying unsuccessfully to clear it. The sight of Anderson’s eyes gave him a little thrill of revulsion. “What are you after?” the young professor asked him, nodding toward the shotgun Elliot was cradling. “Whatever there is,” Elliot said. Anderson took a quick look at the distant pasture behind him and then turned back to Elliot. The mouth hole of the professor’s mask filled with teeth. Elliot thought that Anderson’s teeth were quite as he had imagined them earlier. “Well, Polonski’s cows are locked up,” the professor said. “So they at least are safe.” Elliot realized that the professor had made a joke and was smiling. “Yes,” he agreed. Professor Anderson and his wife had been the moving force behind an initiative to outlaw the discharge of firearms within the boundaries of East Ilford Township. The initiative had been defeated, because East Ilford was not that kind of town. “I think I’ll go over by the river,” Elliot said. He said it only to have something to say, to fill the silence before Anderson spoke again. He was afraid of what Anderson might say to him and of what might happen. “You know,” Anderson said, “that’s all bird sanctuary over there now.” “Sure,” Elliot agreed. Outfitted as he was, the professor attracted Elliot’s anger in an elemental manner. The mask made him appear a kind of doll, a kachina figure or a marionette. His eyes and mouth, all on their own, were disagreeable. Elliot began to wonder if Anderson could smell the whiskey on his breath. He pushed the little red bull’s-eye safety button on his gun to Off. “Seriously,” Anderson said, “I’m always having to run hunters out of there. Some people don’t understand the word ‘posted.’“ “I would never do that,” Elliot said. “I would be afraid.” Anderson nodded his head. He seemed to be laughing. “Would you?” he asked Elliot merrily. In imagination, Elliot rested the tip of his shotgun barrel against Anderson’s smiling teeth. If he fired a load of deer shot into them, he thought, they might make a noise like broken china. “Yes,” Elliot said. “I wouldn’t know who they were or where they’d been. They might resent my being alive. Telling them where they could shoot and where not.” Anderson’s teeth remained in place. “That’s pretty strange,” he said. “I mean, to talk about resenting someone for being alive.” “It’s all relative,” Elliot said. “They might think, ‘Why should he be alive when some brother of mine isn’t?’ Or they might think, ‘Why should he be alive when I’m not?’“ “Oh,” Anderson said. “You see?” Elliot said. Facing Anderson, he took a long step backward. “All relative.” “Yes,” Anderson said. “That’s so often true, isn’t it?” Elliot asked. “Values are often relative.” “Yes,” Anderson said Elliot was relieved to see that he had stopped smiling. “I’ve hardly slept, you know,” Elliot told Professor Anderson. “Hardly at all. All night. I’ve been drinking.” “Oh,” Anderson said. He licked his lips in the mouth of the mask. “You should get some rest.” “You’re right,” Elliot said. “Well,” Anderson said, “got to go now.” Elliot thought he sounded a little thick in the tongue. A little slow in the jaw. “It’s a nice day,” Elliot said, wanting now to be agreeable. “It’s great,” Anderson said, shuffling on his skis. “Have a nice day,” Elliot said. “Yes,” Anderson said, and pushed off. Elliot rested the shotgun across his shoulders and watched Anderson withdraw through the frozen swamp. It was in fact a nice day, but Elliot took no comfort in the weather. He missed night and the falling snow. As he walked back toward his house, he realized that now there would be whole days to get through, running before the antic energy of whiskey. The whiskey would drive him until he dropped. He shook his head in regret. “It’s a revolution,” he said aloud. He imagined himself talking to his wife. Getting drunk was an insurrection, a revolution — a bad one. There would be outsize bogus emotions. There would be petty moral blackmail and cheap remorse. He had said dreadful things to his wife. He had bullied Anderson with his violence and unhappiness, and Anderson would not forgive him. There would be damn little justice and no mercy. Nearly to the house, he was startled by the desperate feathered drumming of a pheasant’s rush. He froze, and out of instinct brought the gun up in the direction of the sound. When he saw the bird break from its cover and take wing, he tracked it, took a breath, and fired once. The bird was a little flash of opulent color against the bright blue sky. Elliot felt himself flying for a moment. The shot missed. Lowering the gun, he remembered the deer shells he had loaded. A hit with the concentrated shot would have pulverized the bird, and he was glad he had missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself. As soon as he grew aware of the emotion he was indulging, he suppressed it. Pissing and moaning, mourning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug. The shot echoed from the distant hills. Smoke hung in the air. He turned and looked behind him and saw, far away across the pasture, the tiny blue-and-red figure of Professor Anderson motionless against the snow. Then Elliot turned again toward his house and took a few labored steps and looked up to see his wife at the bedroom window. She stood perfectly still, and the morning sun lit her nakedness. He stopped where he was. She had heard the shot and run to the window. What had she thought to see? Burnt rags and blood on the snow. How relieved was she now? How disappointed? Elliot thought he could feel his wife trembling at the window. She was hugging herself. Her hands clasped her shoulders. Elliot took his snow goggles off and shaded his eyes with his hand. He stood in the field staring. The length of the gun was between them, he thought. Somehow she had got out in front of it, to the wrong side of the wire. If he looked long enough he would find everything out there. He would find himself down the sight. How beautiful she is, he thought. The effect was striking. The window was so clear because he had washed it himself, with vinegar. At the best of times he was a difficult, fussy man. Elliot began to hope for forgiveness. He leaned the shotgun on his forearm and raised his left hand and waved to her. Show a hand, he thought. Please just show a hand. He was cold, but it had got light. He wanted no more than the gesture. It seemed to him that he could build another day on it. Another day was all you needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.

It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened. It didn’t take more than an hour after they pulled her out from between my legs for me to realize something was wrong. Really wrong. She was so black she scared me. Midnight black, Sudanese black. I’m light-skinned, with good hair, what we call high yellow, and so is Lula Ann’s father. Ain’t nobody in my family anywhere near that color. Tar is the closest I can think of, yet her hair don’t go with the skin. It’s different—straight but curly, like the hair on those naked tribes in Australia. You might think she’s a throwback, but a throwback to what? You should’ve seen my grandmother; she passed for white, married a white man, and never said another word to any one of her children. Any letter she got from my mother or my aunts she sent right back, unopened. Finally they got the message of no message and let her be. Almost all mulatto types and quadroons did that back in the day—if they had the right kind of hair, that is. Can you imagine how many white folks have Negro blood hiding in their veins? Guess. Twenty per cent, I heard. My own mother, Lula Mae, could have passed easy, but she chose not to. She told me the price she paid for that decision. When she and my father went to the courthouse to get married, there were two Bibles, and they had to put their hands on the one reserved for Negroes. The other one was for white people’s hands. The Bible! Can you beat it? My mother was a housekeeper for a rich white couple. They ate every meal she cooked and insisted she scrub their backs while they sat in the tub, and God knows what other intimate things they made her do, but no touching of the same Bible. Some of you probably think it’s a bad thing to group ourselves according to skin color—the lighter the better—in social clubs, neighborhoods, churches, sororities, even colored schools. But how else can we hold on to a little dignity? How else can we avoid being spit on in a drugstore, elbowed at the bus stop, having to walk in the gutter to let whites have the whole sidewalk, being charged a nickel at the grocer’s for a paper bag that’s free to white shoppers? Let alone all the name-calling. I heard about all of that and much, much more. But because of my mother’s skin color she wasn’t stopped from trying on hats or using the ladies’ room in the department stores. And my father could try on shoes in the front part of the shoe store, not in a back room. Neither one of them would let themselves drink from a “Colored Only” fountain, even if they were dying of thirst. I hate to say it, but from the very beginning in the maternity ward the baby, Lula Ann, embarrassed me. Her birth skin was pale like all babies’, even African ones, but it changed fast. I thought I was going crazy when she turned blue-black right before my eyes. I know I went crazy for a minute, because—just for a few seconds—I held a blanket over her face and pressed. But I couldn’t do that, no matter how much I wished she hadn’t been born with that terrible color. I even thought of giving her away to an orphanage someplace. But I was scared to be one of those mothers who leave their babies on church steps. Recently, I heard about a couple in Germany, white as snow, who had a dark-skinned baby nobody could explain. Twins, I believe—one white, one colored. But I don’t know if it’s true. All I know is that, for me, nursing her was like having a pickaninny sucking my teat. I went to bottle-feeding soon as I got home. My husband, Louis, is a porter, and when he got back off the rails he looked at me like I really was crazy and looked at the baby like she was from the planet Jupiter. He wasn’t a cussing man, so when he said, “God damn! What the hell is this?” I knew we were in trouble. That was what did it—what caused the fights between me and him. It broke our marriage to pieces. We had three good years together, but when she was born he blamed me and treated Lula Ann like she was a stranger—more than that, an enemy. He never touched her. I never did convince him that I ain’t never, ever fooled around with another man. He was dead sure I was lying. We argued and argued till I told him her blackness had to be from his own family—not mine. That was when it got worse, so bad he just up and left and I had to look for another, cheaper place to live. I did the best I could. I knew enough not to take her with me when I applied to landlords, so I left her with a teen-age cousin to babysit. I didn’t take her outside much, anyway, because, when I pushed her in the baby carriage, people would lean down and peek in to say something nice and then give a start or jump back before frowning. That hurt. I could have been the babysitter if our skin colors were reversed. It was hard enough just being a colored woman—even a high-yellow one—trying to rent in a decent part of the city. Back in the nineties, when Lula Ann was born, the law was against discriminating in who you could rent to, but not many landlords paid attention to it. They made up reasons to keep you out. But I got lucky with Mr. Leigh, though I know he upped the rent seven dollars from what he’d advertised, and he had a fit if you were a minute late with the money. I told her to call me “Sweetness” instead of “Mother” or “Mama.” It was safer. Her being that black and having what I think are too thick lips and calling me “Mama” would’ve confused people. Besides, she has funny-colored eyes, crow black with a blue tint—something witchy about them, too. Buy the print » So it was just us two for a long while, and I don’t have to tell you how hard it is being an abandoned wife. I guess Louis felt a little bit bad after leaving us like that, because a few months later on he found out where I’d moved to and started sending me money once a month, though I never asked him to and didn’t go to court to get it. His fifty-dollar money orders and my night job at the hospital got me and Lula Ann off welfare. Which was a good thing. I wish they would stop calling it welfare and go back to the word they used when my mother was a girl. Then it was called “relief.” Sounds much better, like it’s just a short-term breather while you get yourself together. Besides, those welfare clerks are mean as spit. When finally I got work and didn’t need them anymore, I was making more money than they ever did. I guess meanness filled out their skimpy paychecks, which was why they treated us like beggars. Especially when they looked at Lula Ann and then back at me—like I was trying to cheat or something. Things got better but I still had to be careful. Very careful in how I raised her. I had to be strict, very strict. Lula Ann needed to learn how to behave, how to keep her head down and not to make trouble. I don’t care how many times she changes her name. Her color is a cross she will always carry. But it’s not my fault. It’s not my fault. It’s not. Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little. But you have to understand: I had to protect her. She didn’t know the world. With that skin, there was no point in being tough or sassy, even when you were right. Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired. She didn’t know any of that or how her black skin would scare white people or make them laugh and try to trick her. I once saw a girl nowhere near as dark as Lula Ann who couldn’t have been more than ten years old tripped by one of a group of white boys and when she tried to scramble up another one put his foot on her behind and knocked her flat again. Those boys held their stomachs and bent over with laughter. Long after she got away, they were still giggling, so proud of themselves. If I hadn’t been watching through the bus window I would have helped her, pulled her away from that white trash. See, if I hadn’t trained Lula Ann properly she wouldn’t have known to always cross the street and avoid white boys. But the lessons I taught her paid off, and in the end she made me proud as a peacock. I wasn’t a bad mother, you have to know that, but I may have done some hurtful things to my only child because I had to protect her. Had to. All because of skin privileges. At first I couldn’t see past all that black to know who she was and just plain love her. But I do. I really do. I think she understands now. I think so. Last two times I saw her she was, well, striking. Kind of bold and confident. Each time she came to see me, I forgot just how black she really was because she was using it to her advantage in beautiful white clothes. Taught me a lesson I should have known all along. What you do to children matters. And they might never forget. As soon as she could, she left me all alone in that awful apartment. She got as far away from me as she could: dolled herself up and got a big-time job in California. She don’t call or visit anymore. She sends me money and stuff every now and then, but I ain’t seen her in I don’t know how long. I prefer this place—Winston House—to those big, expensive nursing homes outside the city. Mine is small, homey, cheaper, with twenty-four-hour nurses and a doctor who comes twice a week. I’m only sixty-three—too young for pasture—but I came down with some creeping bone disease, so good care is vital. The boredom is worse than the weakness or the pain, but the nurses are lovely. One just kissed me on the cheek when I told her I was going to be a grandmother. Her smile and her compliments were fit for someone about to be crowned. I showed her the note on blue paper that I got from Lula Ann—well, she signed it “Bride,” but I never pay that any attention. Her words sounded giddy. “Guess what, S. I am so, so happy to pass along this news. I am going to have a baby. I’m too, too thrilled and hope you are, too.” I reckon the thrill is about the baby, not its father, because she doesn’t mention him at all. I wonder if he is as black as she is. If so, she needn’t worry like I did. Things have changed a mite from when I was young. Blue-blacks are all over TV, in fashion magazines, commercials, even starring in movies. There is no return address on the envelope. So I guess I’m still the bad parent being punished forever till the day I die for the well-intended and, in fact, necessary way I brought her up. I know she hates me. Our relationship is down to her sending me money. I have to say I’m grateful for the cash, because I don’t have to beg for extras, like some of the other patients. If I want my own fresh deck of cards for solitaire, I can get it and not need to play with the dirty, worn one in the lounge. And I can buy my special face cream. But I’m not fooled. I know the money she sends is a way to stay away and quiet down the little bit of conscience she’s got left. If I sound irritable, ungrateful, part of it is because underneath is regret. All the little things I didn’t do or did wrong. I remember when she had her first period and how I reacted. Or the times I shouted when she stumbled or dropped something. True. I was really upset, even repelled by her black skin when she was born and at first I thought of . . . No. I have to push those memories away—fast. No point. I know I did the best for her under the circumstances. When my husband ran out on us, Lula Ann was a burden. A heavy one, but I bore it well. Yes, I was tough on her. You bet I was. By the time she turned twelve going on thirteen, I had to be even tougher. She was talking back, refusing to eat what I cooked, primping her hair. When I braided it, she’d go to school and unbraid it. I couldn’t let her go bad. I slammed the lid and warned her about the names she’d be called. Still, some of my schooling must have rubbed off. See how she turned out? A rich career girl. Can you beat it? Now she’s pregnant. Good move, Lula Ann. If you think mothering is all cooing, booties, and diapers you’re in for a big shock. Big. You and your nameless boyfriend, husband, pickup—whoever—imagine, Oooh! A baby! Kitchee kitchee koo! Listen to me. You are about to find out what it takes, how the world is, how it works, and how it changes when you are a parent. Good luck, and God help the child.

She was a little girl with red-gold sausage curls, curls darker than red-gold. She did have this lovely hair. She also had thick creamy skin and gray-blue eyes that wondered. Very young, she read all the stories in which the fairies and the kindest mothers and fathers and the strangers in the woods who were benevolent to lost children said, if not in so many words, “It is good to be good.” But, even without the painted finger of the fables pointing in that direction, Alice would have been inclined to be good. Babies arrive with dispositions, and this was hers. Her mother was Scottish born and bred—irrational, raucous, bony, quick-tempered, and noisy. She had no feelings. She was bright, like anything burning: a match, a firecracker, a tree. Alice was as watchful as a small herbivorous animal. Mother and child were unsatisfied. They looked at each other. Luckily for the mother, she also had two sons, younger than the girl—golden, milky boys, not made entirely of wood and flames like their mother, nor of guileless life like their sister, but a mixture of both, and somehow not quite enough of either. They were extremely pretty children just the same. Like Alice, the brothers had remarkable hair and eyes, but their great triumph over her was that they were boys. She began to perceive that this, more than curls or thoughtful ways, was what pleased. The question was: Could one terribly good girl ever, in her mother’s eyes, equal one boy? And the answer was no. Alice was a feminine, old-fashioned girl. She neither looked like, felt like, behaved like nor wanted to be like a boy. But she did want her mother to notice her, to be pleased with her, to affirm to everyone, “Alice is here.” The family had come to Australia from the Old Country, bringing old ways. Alice was, for the century or so of her childhood, a nursemaid, nanny, and servant to her brothers. Knowing the weight the boys bore in her mother’s mind, she was aged by the responsibility before she was ten years old. If they ran and fell over, dirtied their clothing, cried experimentally or out of bad humor, if they broke any household idols, or in any way irritated their mother, it was all, all Alice’s fault. The child began to have doubts. Sometimes, when Alice was walking down the street, one passerby would say to another, “Did you see that gorgeous hair? What a color!” And she’d wish dreadfully that her mother had been there. The amazing thing, though, was that if her mother was there she never heard it. Or if she did hear she didn’t understand. Or if she did understand she didn’t care. Visitors learned to praise the boys, and not Alice. Even visitors liked to please her mother. It was safer. Oh, the family had a father. But he went away to be a soldier and was gone for years. When he came back, he was even more silent than before, and the mother indicated that he was of no account. He went to his mysterious work, and spent almost as much time there as he had at the war. When he returned to the house, it was only to eat and sleep. Much later, after the children were all grown up, he died. The day after the funeral, no one could remember his voice. Meanwhile, the boys swam in attention and praise, and at an early age had had so much that they never needed it again, could afford to discard that particular life buoy and plunge out with a glossy confidence in their qualities. Alice never even learned to dog-paddle. Who would notice if she sank? The deep end was too risky for a girl whose brilliant dark-red curls could be so easily overlooked. Now and then a teacher or an acquaintance would toss her a few friendly words. Naturally, if she hadn’t needed them so badly, she could have collected ten times as many. But she had never heard of supply and demand, wasn’t aware of such a thing as a seller’s market, and wouldn’t have applied it to her own case if she had. Like a solitary bowerbird, she hid these tiny pieces of blue glass around her nest and treasured them, though frequent inspection soon took their color away. Alice knew only that something was not fair. Here she was, a good girl, a nice girl, pretty to look at, obedient, kind, clever at school, and with beautiful hair—yet none of it was good enough. While the boys were somehow perfect. And not because they didn’t try but because they never had to. They were welcome when they arrived. Because Alice’s deepest attention, you might even say her soul, was busy looking back, over its shoulder, she had few acquaintances and no friends. For many years her duties toward the boys, and her strivings to please her mother, took up her whole life. And all this time the mother stayed about the same age; the boys were permanently young, since that was their mother’s desire. Only Alice and her father grew old. One of the boys played the mouth organ and went shooting; the other sketched and painted, and in the interest of his muscles trained at the local gymnasium with a group of amateur boxers. There were photographs of him, gloves raised, head lowered, forehead threateningly wrinkled. There were photographs of football teams in which both boys were illuminated, among all the other hefty thighs and striped jumpers, by their saintly blond heads. On Saturdays and Sundays, they went surfing at the local beaches, taking their girlfriends. Alice had none of these occupations. She would have liked to take piano lessons, but these were the Depression years, whatever that meant. It was the Depression that made everyone unhappy. Quite possibly her mother might have valued her greatly if it weren’t for that. Who knows? (Yet her mother was not unhappy, being herself.) Alice baked little cakes for the boys’ picnics, as her mother told her to. Though she never complained, she did feel resentful, baking in the summer heat. Temperatures outside in the shade went over the hundred mark; the heat in the kitchen, with the oven on, was not investigated. Alice fainted sometimes. The house was always busy with people—“that little Robinson woman” or “that little Fenwick man”—coming to see her mother. They sat upright on the big leather sofa or on the edge of one of the chairs, while her mother marched to and fro hypnotizing them with her enormous effrontery, her energy, her noisy laughter. If the visitors wanted advice of any description, she never hesitated. She was the most positive person any of them had ever come across. Though her opinions were based on nothing but inspiration, and were wrong as often as the law of averages allows, she had the virtue of being certain of everything in uncertain times. The relief of it! The little men and women went away livelier, diverted from their troubles, forgetting to sigh for whole blocks as they walked home through the flat suburban streets. (Only the stars were wonderful in that place, but because they were always there they were never noticed.) Alice’s mother told her little men and women about the Old Country. She told them about snow. They had never seen snow, but they were willing to try to picture it. With incredulous half-smiles, they listened to her account of the stuff—so pure, so clean, so cold, the very opposite of everything here. Did it exist? Was there really an Old Country? Their eyes were wistful. They knew it was true. It was just that they couldn’t quite believe it. If the father came in while they were there, he walked straight through the room without a word or a look. Everyone was used to this and thought nothing of it. The mother’s vehement talk, her triumphant shouts of laughter, continued without interruption. “Wow, this new version is a way more immersive waste of our youth.”Buy the print » No one in that town could have ambitions beyond not being hungry, not being in debt, not being unemployed. Later in life, Alice never found anyone who shared her impressions of her youth and that time. Either she moved in different circles from those she had known then or the others more easily forgot. She remembered everything: crowds of men going nowhere in army-surplus sandshoes and khaki overcoats, men with swags of dead rabbits for sale, men with small suitcases full of useless items (no more than an excuse to talk), like those small bottles of startling green and red dye that her mother bought. For years, they stood in the pantry. No one knew what they were supposed to be for. Years later still, some of the boys’ children found and drank them, watered down, as a test of courage. They didn’t die. Head bent, polishing the boys’ shoes or occupied with some other mother-pleasing chore, Alice listened to the travelling men, knowing only that they absolutely could not be turned away. It was her mother’s nature to give; she was expansive and generous, though her tongue must often have poisoned the food she distributed so willingly at the back door. No charge could be laid against Alice’s mother. She was only herself. The men’s pride? Alice’s feelings? A good dose of castor oil was what they all needed. Alice had a little job somewhere. Thin, pale, she ate a banana in the midday heat, thinking of the Old Country and the clean cold. The buildings there had stood for generations. Here was an enormous expanse on the map but a small black hot place in reality. Four flat black miles in a tram to the coast, through weeds and tumbledown one- and two-story buildings. The people, her mother often said contemptuously, were like Gypsies. But they were not imaginative or gay, as Alice thought Gypsies might be, only temporary-seeming, accidental, huddling about the masses of steelworks and hotel bars. And Alice in the midst of this. If her mother could not like her or notice her ever, how terrible! How terrible! Sometimes people made the opening gestures of friendship in the rough style of the district, but often Alice missed them entirely, as a tired person might, for was her mother not holding the floor, making speeches about “my sons, my boys”? At other times, Alice treasured any overture. “Mr. Wade said to me . . .” “Sally Grey wants me to go . . .” No one heard. If she persisted until her mother was forced to listen, her mother’s eyes went blank. Or she was actually listening to the races on the radio three rooms away. Or she would talk Alice down with instructions and demands. Because her mother was her mother, and there was no one else, Alice thought she was marvellous. One day, Alice said, “Eric Lane wants to take me to—” For the first time, her mother attended, standing still. Eric was brought to the house, and Eric and Alice were married before there was time to say “knife.” How did it happen? She tried to trace it back. She was watching her mother performing for Eric, and then (she always paused here in her mind), somehow, she woke up married and in another house. Eric was all right, but he was almost as young as she was and knew no more about the world. In fact, he knew less, because this was his birthplace. He had no snowy memories, no castles, no wild cherry trees, no sound stone houses with polished brass and roaring fires, no Halloween, no ghosts or witches, no legends of his own going back to the morning of the world, no proper accent, like the people there. At home. Poor Eric had only this empty place where no one belonged, and the Depression, and swimming in the sea with sharks, and sinking and drowning, because who would notice here? He liked her hair—but still her mother didn’t care. So Alice was with Eric, being a wife. Since Eric was an ordinary boy, and she had these extraordinary memories and her extraordinary mother, Alice was sometimes lively and high-handed with him. He told her that girls with her hair color had quick tempers. Alice found a sparky temper. For short periods, she planned a flower garden, or worried about her cooking, or sang. But there was no money, except to pay the rent and buy food. There were no books. There was no person to talk to who understood anything more of the world than she and Eric did. There were only rumors, legends about it. The world sounded like such a strange place. They felt shy. “We were closer to the Middle Ages than to people now,” she said, years later. But that was not it. In those days, only someone like Julius Caesar could have been compared with her mother. After two or three years, Eric’s work took him into the country, where there was no accommodation for wives. And Alice’s mother said that she hoped he didn’t think any girl of hers was going to rough it in the Australian bush because he was too lazy to get work in town. Gosh! Gosh! Speaking up for Alice! But Eric didn’t hold it against her. He thought she was a card, Alice’s mother. Anxious and eager, Alice hovered about her mother’s house, still helping with the boys, listening with an inward drooping to endless tales of their exploits. Yet again, she heard about their winning looks; how one of them was known locally as Smiler; how the mother had bought them these expensive garments, that extravagant gadget; how they set about acquiring what they wanted from her—flattering, teasing, kissing, asking, cuddling, demanding, making her laugh. Alice learned to laugh, too, bitterly. If she said what she thought, her mother’s retorts could leave her bleeding, and frequently did. Yet, as soon as the scars had healed, she protested again. Her mother took it that Alice begrudged the boys whatever item they had most recently conjured out of her, and would argue about a piano, or a type of car, till Alice was ready to die. She couldn’t say, “We are not talking about pianos or cars!,” because she didn’t know this. Something about her mother’s argument was murdering her. Ever afterward, she looked at the boys’ piano and car with loathing. From the bush, Eric sent home his money. When he had leave, he came back for a few days. A fair amount of time passed. Then the news all came out in an anonymous letter. Eric had sung a love song to a pretty girl’s accompaniment. Eric had slept with the girl. The girl’s father was very angry. Alice’s mother was very angry. There were meetings and consultations, wild words and tears. Finally, Alice and Eric moved away from the hideous place with the smoky skies, that hopeless place whose own inhabitants could find no good word to say for it. Now Alice was hours by train from her mother, and there was no money for journeys. Eric was chastened and listless from his joust with experience. Yes, he had sung that love song to the girl in the bush, but he had also shared Alice’s snow and, in a way, owned Alice’s spectacular hair. It would be nice if she would forgive him, now that they were together. They might go to a dance. He would sing songs to her, too, better songs. He appreciated her cooking. There was some indefinable thing about Alice that he liked so much. She was deep. He didn’t understand her. For all these reasons, but particularly for the last, he was willing to love her forever. Oh, Alice! Eric. He was only a familiar foreigner who looked at her expectantly. She needed to be dazzled. He was impressed by the strength of her mysterious longings, but he was a follower, too, and two followers together are bound to lose the way. At first, he tried to walk behind Alice, assuming that she knew where they were going. How could he know that she was only trailing her mother, since there was no other leader whose approbation could mean so much? After a while, he began to feel stumped. In his dreams, they wandered hand in hand, but he was no comfort to Alice. She was always looking into the distance, farther than he could see. He was grateful to wake up. Everything was all right, really; it was just that there was a sensation in their small wooden house that, somewhere close by, someone was dying of starvation. Now that miles of trees and railway lines divided Alice and her mother, a new element entered the world: Alice’s talent for remaking reality. Her mother—what a martyr to those wicked boys, that silent husband! How free and easy with the neighbors! Anyone could turn to her. And how the boys and their wives took advantage of her good nature! Alice fumed, pale and silent. Eric asked if she felt O.K. He was rough. The way he arranged his words, awkwardly, with a natural impatience, even when cheerful, would have left marks on Alice if she had cared. Now, when he thought to compliment her in some backhanded way, she looked at him as if he hadn’t spoken. As if anything he could say . . . As if his opinion . . . With no feelings even as strong as sadness or contempt, she overlooked his well-meaning efforts to encourage her. He had no idea. Nobody knew. She didn’t even know herself. “That’s doctor inmate 2264.”Buy the print » It dawned on Eric that Alice had something on her mind a great deal of the time. For all he knew, having something on your mind was natural to women. In other ways, she was a good wife. He liked her hair. He even liked her temper. Once, they had had some fun. Of course, they were getting older, two or three years older. But no one had ever warned him that age could subdue you so fast, so soon. “The boys are all right. Don’t worry about your mother. She’s O.K. She wants to give things to them—let her!” Secretly, he was grieved and envious not to receive a share of any bounty that was on offer. But he wore a sturdy front. “They impose. They’re imposing on her. I can stand anything but imposition,” Alice would say, damped down. Letters poured out of her, smoking, in terms she would have been afraid to use face to face with her mother. She called her loving names. She called herself her mother’s loving daughter. She advised her mother not to give in to the boys’ demands. They were mean and nasty. They were insatiable. She hated them (though she didn’t say that). The letters she received in return were slow to come, short, predictable. Still her hopes lifted daily: a letter would arrive from her mother that would mend her life. If Alice had a fault, dangerous to her survival, it was that she was inordinately reluctant to learn from experience. She would not. Because the lesson would be so sad. And she had spent so much of her life going in the opposite direction from the lesson. And still the lesson pursued her, like a monster through the forest. Of course, it was a hard lesson that not everyone has to learn. The mother visited from time to time. She and Eric jollied each other along. Alice planned for weeks beforehand—everything had to be perfect. Then she could do nothing right. Her ways were different from her mother’s, and therefore to be scorned. Sharp laughter, sharper comments, news of the boys rapped out with some exultation. Alice suffered. Her mother laughed. Eric wondered what was going on, and tried a few wisecracks. Then, “It’ll all blow over,” he would say to one or the other. “She’s probably under the weather. Happens in the best of families. Bit of a flareup, then it’s all over.” No one took any notice of Eric. He was like a gnat, talking his own language to two large creatures who were enemies, but enemies concerned with each other as they were not with him. Even yet there were days when Alice’s looks and ways were pleasing to others. And she would cling to the gift of their willingness to approve of her. All she would allow herself to think was: I wish there were someone I could tell. Not mentioning any names. Artlessly, she marvelled that people thought they could reach her. They were so separate from her. Why couldn’t they understand this? Years went by. The road where Alice had stopped now stretched far in either direction. She didn’t want to follow it. Occasionally, she looked along its length. She stood there with a little crowd of girls and women, all with ravishing red-gold curls. There had been this accident, so long ago that none of them could remember quite what it was. A horrible accident. They couldn’t get over it. And, unluckily, no one had ever passed by who understood this, or explained that you could walk away, sometimes, from bad accidents. Once again, Eric’s work took him into the country. He didn’t want to go, but he had no choice. While he was there, he slept with another girl, and this time there was a divorce. It didn’t really matter, though, because the mother had found another man for Alice, a man who might make more money. He was much older than she was, and very different from Eric—demanding, critical, sarcastic, powerful, brutal. He was like Alice’s mother in strength, except that he never laughed. Next to him, Alice’s mother seemed better. Now Alice’s life was truly hard. No one would have believed how hard it was, but, anyway, no one knew. Now there were two who could never be pleased, two who believed that anything could be bought. This did not prevent her, Alice being Alice, from restoring their images nightly with fresh paint and plaster and rearranging their robes in ever more becoming folds. The dreadful boys went from bad to worse, persecuting her wonderful mother. The man had a lot to put up with, too, with the world not appreciating him as it should. But occasionally Alice still ventured to wish, when a stranger put a field flower in her hand, that there were someone she could tell. Nothing changed. Neither the mother nor the man nor Alice. The boys deteriorated slightly, receiving one shock after another, when the rest of the population proved less indulgent than their mother. Everyone grew much older. They had all worked hard. One of the strangers who sometimes talked to Alice now was a girl, a neighbor. Alice’s hair was gray. The girl had no mother or father. For five minutes at a time, Alice would listen to stories of the girl’s life, and each thought of small helpful things to do for the other. When the man was ill, as he often was now, being quite old, the girl took the trouble to fetch and carry for Alice. Alice returned the good will in more than equal measure: she would never be in someone’s debt. Just the same, this activity was no more pleasing to her than the chirp of a small canary. It was pitiful, in its way, because the girl thought, as had others in the past, that she was really talking to Alice, was friendly with Alice. She didn’t realize that Alice had received no sanction for any such behavior from her mother or from the man. What a strange little girl to think that she mattered, when Alice’s mother was frail and ill, and the boys were bleeding her of every penny, and she still thought them ideal in their greed and insincerity. One day, the girl told Alice that she was soon to be married. Alice was dubious about boys, but she met this one and liked him—a country boy with honest eyes. Regularly now, she heard about the wedding. She always listened seriously, and gave excellent advice, much wiser on the girl’s behalf than she could ever be on her own. She was invited to the ceremony and the reception, and would have been mildly pleased to go, but the man was ill. Everything was complicated, as it had always been. On the wedding day, Alice brushed her hair and looked in the mirror at her sleepless eyes. The latest letters from her mother had complained about Alice and the man in violent terms. They sent presents when she wanted cash to pass on to the ever-hungry boys. Was this complaint fair? Attending to the house and the man, who was ill in bed, drugged, Alice sometimes noticed the clock and remembered what day it was. At last, the man fed and sleeping again, Alice sat down alone. And then, from the top of the garden path, someone was calling her name, and through the greenery and the late-summer flowers the girl came in her wedding dress and shimmering veil, like a bird or an angel, on her way to the church. Wonder almost lifted Alice off the ground. Stopping cars, leaving bridesmaids hovering by the gate, the girl floated down. She had thought of Alice, wanted Alice’s blessing at this astonishing moment. Everything shone with light—the sky, the garden, the girl in white, and Alice. This was like nothing that had ever happened before. The girl and Alice smiled. Even after the girl left, in clouds and drifts of white, nothing seemed substantial. A buoyancy, an airiness, something quite amazing surrounded Alice. She had no idea what it was called. Oh, but she wished, she wished that there were someone she could tell. Then, in the middle of this tremendous wish, Alice paused: a great thing was beginning to happen to her. A new thought appeared in her mind, yet Alice recognized it as if it had always been there. The thought said, But I know. I know. After this she looked the same, and her circumstances didn’t alter, but she was a different person altogether.

Since moving to the country, I find myself growing sleepy by ten o’clock at night. I retire at the same time as my parakeets and the chickens in the coop. In bed, I peruse “Phantasms of the Living,” but I must soon turn off the light. A dreamless sleep—or one with dreams I can’t recall—takes hold of me until two in the morning. At two, I wake up completely rested, my head buzzing with plans and possibilities. On the winter night I will describe, it came to me to write about a Communist—in fact, a Communist theoretician—who attends a leftist conference on world peace and sees a ghost. I saw it all clearly: the meeting hall, the portraits of Marx and Engels, the table covered with a green cloth, the Communist, Morris Krakower, a short, stocky man with a head of close-cropped hair and a pair of steely eyes behind thick-lensed pince-nez. The conference takes place in Warsaw in the thirties, the era of Stalinist terror and the Moscow Trials. Morris Krakower disguises his defense of Stalin in the jargon of Marxist theory, but everyone grasps his meaning. In his speech, he proclaims that only the dictatorship of the proletariat can insure peace, and, therefore, no deviation either to the right or to the left can be tolerated. World peace is in the hands of the N.K.V.D. After the reports, the delegates congregate for a friendly glass of tea. Again, Comrade Krakower holds forth. Officially, he is one of the delegates, but in reality he is a representative of the Comintern. His goatee is reminiscent of Lenin’s; his voice has a hard metallic ring. He is thoroughly grounded in Marxism and knows several languages; he has delivered lectures at the Sorbonne. Twice a year, he travels to Moscow. And, as if all this were not sufficient, he is also the son of a rich man: his father owns oil wells near Drohobycz. He doesn’t have to be a paid Party functionary. Morris Krakower is clever at conspiracy, but intrigue isn’t necessary here. The press is admitted to the sessions; the police have infiltrated their spies, but Morris needn’t fear arrest. Even if he were arrested, it would be no great tragedy. In prison, he could devote his time to reading. He would smuggle out manuscripts to arouse the masses. A few weeks of prison can only enhance the prestige of a Party worker. Outdoors, there’s a frost. Toward evening, snow falls. The tea drinking ends, and Morris Krakower heads for his hotel. The streets are smooth, white fields through which trolley cars glide half-empty. The shopkeepers have all lowered their window shades and are fast asleep. Above the rooftops, numberless stars glitter. If intelligent beings exist on other planets, Krakower reflects, perhaps their lives are also regulated by five-year plans. He smiles at the thought. His thick lips part, revealing large, square teeth. A madwoman sits on the curb. Next to her is a basket full of old newspapers and rags. Withdrawn and dishevelled, her eyes shining fiercely, she converses with her demon. Somewhere nearby, a tomcat yowls. A night watchman in a fur jacket and hood is checking the shopkeepers’ locks. Morris Krakower goes into his hotel, gets the key from the clerk, and takes the elevator to the fourth floor. The long corridor reminds him of a prison. He opens the door to his room and enters. The chambermaid has changed the bed linen. All he needs to do is undress. Tomorrow, the conference starts late, so Morris will be able to catch up on sleep. He puts on new pajamas. How uncharismatic a barefoot leader in ill-fitting pajamas looks! He lies down on the bed and turns out the light on the night table. The room is dark and cool, and he falls asleep immediately. Suddenly, he feels the blanket being pulled at his feet. He wakes up. What can it be? Is there a cat in the room? A dog? He shakes off his sleepiness and turns on the light. No, there’s no one there. He must have imagined it. He turns the light out and goes to sleep, but someone starts to pull the blanket again. Morris has to pull it back or else become uncovered. “What kind of business is this?” he asks himself. He turns on the light once more. Apparently, his nerves are on edge. He is surprised, because he is in good health and well rested lately. Everything is going smoothly at the conference. He removes the blanket and examines the sheets. He gets out of bed and checks to make sure the door is chained. He peeks into the closet. Nothing. “Well, I must have been dreaming,” he concludes, although he knows it was no dream. “A hallucination?” Morris Krakower is annoyed at himself. He turns out the light and goes back to bed. “Enough of this stupidity!” But someone is definitely pulling the blanket again. Morris sits up in bed with such force that the mattress springs ring out. Someone, some invisible being, is pulling the blanket and pulling it with the strength of human hands. Morris doesn’t move a muscle. Have I gone out of my mind? he thinks. Am I suffering from a nervous breakdown? He releases the blanket, and the invisible presence, the power whose existence is impossible, immediately draws it toward the foot of the bed. Morris is uncovered to the knees. “What the devil is this?” he says aloud. He doesn’t want to admit it, but he is frightened. He can hear his heart pounding. There must be some explanation. It can’t be a ghost. As soon as the word enters his mind, terror grips him. Maybe this is some kind of sabotage. But by whom? And how? The blanket has fallen off the bed entirely. Morris wants to turn the light on, but he can’t find the switch. His feet are cold, but his head is hot. By accident he knocks the lamp off the night table. He jumps out of bed and tries to turn on the overhead light, but he bumps into a chair. He reaches the switch and turns on the light. The blanket is lying on the floor. The parchment lampshade has toppled from the lamp. Again, Morris looks in the closet, goes to the window and raises the blinds. The street is white, empty. He searches for a door leading to another room, but there isn’t one. He bends down and feels around under the bed, opens the door to the corridor. No one is there. “Should I call the porter? But what can I tell him? No, I can’t make a fool of myself!” he decides. He closes the door, locks it, and lets the blinds down. He replaces the blanket on the bed and sets the lampshade back on the lamp. “This is insane,” he mutters. Morris Krakower has broken out in a sweat, though the room is cold. The palms of his hands are moist. “It must be some kind of neurasthenia,” he says, trying to reassure himself. He considers leaving the light on for a while, but is ashamed at his cowardice. “I must not allow myself to fall victim to such superstition!” He switches the light off and walks unsteadily back to his bed. He is no longer the same self-confident Morris Krakower, spokesman for the Comintern. He is a frightened man. Will whatever it is start pulling the blanket again? For a while, Morris lies motionless. The blanket doesn’t budge. Outside the window, he hears the muffled clanging of a trolley car. He is still in the center of a civilized city and not in a desert or at the North Pole. “It’s all in my mind!” he reasons. “I must sleep!” He shuts his eyes. Immediately he senses a tug. No, it isn’t just a tug but a strong yank. In a second, it has dragged the blanket down to his hips. Morris reaches out, grabs the blanket, and tries to jerk it back quickly. But he has to exert all his strength, because his nocturnal visitor is pulling powerfully in the opposite direction. The visitor is stronger, and Morris must yield. He wheezes, grunts, reviles him. The brief struggle leaves Morris covered with perspiration. “What woes have befallen me!” he says, repeating an expression his mother used. That such utter madness should happen to him, of all people! What could it be? “God in Heaven, can there really be demons? If so, then everything falls apart.” I had fallen asleep and dreamed one of those dreams which recur again and again over the years. I am in a windowless cellar. I either live there or use it as a hideout. The cellar is deep, dark, the dirt floor rutted and mounded. I am afraid, but I know that I must remain there for some time. I open a door and find myself in another small dark room with a straw bed that has no bedding. I sit down on the bed and try to talk myself out of my fear, but it only grows. I hear noises. Dark creatures, soft as cobwebs, creep about in the corridor, whispering. I must escape, but the way back is blocked. I go toward a second exit, but is it there? The corridor narrows, twists, descends. I am no longer walking but crawling, wormlike, toward an opening, but will I reach it? Wait! I’ve left something in the other room—a document, a manuscript—and I must go back for it. This isn’t the only complication. It’s extraordinary, but growths resembling antlers have sprouted on my arms. The last few seconds of the dream are thick with tortuous difficulties too bizarre and numerous to remember. The whole thing is fast becoming ludicrous, and even in my sleep I know that I must awaken from this nightmare, because the power that guides dreams never wishes to risk revealing itself. It is poking fun at its own devices. It throws in weird, incoherent words, transforming the illusion into a caricature. I open my eyes and realize that I have to go to the bathroom. What an involved way to let a person know that he has to urinate! Afterward, I return to my bed and lie quietly, amazed at the deviousness of the sleeping brain. Can there be an explanation for all this? Is there some law governing nightmares? One thing is certain: this dream returns like a leitmotif in a symphony of madness. After a while, I remind myself of my hero, Morris Krakower. What’s happened to him? Oh, yes, his silent opponent is pulling harder, and Morris must let go. So engrossed is he in the tug-of-war that his fear is momentarily forgotten. Suddenly, the other being stops pulling the blanket, and Morris Krakower perceives a shape. He realizes that all this blanket pulling was just a way of drawing his attention to this apparition. Not far from him, at the foot of the bed, stands Comrade Damschak, who a few years ago travelled to Soviet Russia, published several angry attacks there, in which he accused a number of writers of Trotskyism, and then vanished. The face is Damschak’s, but the body is as if dissected, like the cadavers used in medical school to teach anatomy. The muscles and the blood vessels are laid bare. They glow with their own phosphorescent light. Morris Krakower is so stunned that he again forgets to be afraid. The apparition slowly fades before his astonished gaze. For a few minutes, only a membrane or a faint tracery like a network persists, no longer there but not completely gone. Soon even this tracery dissolves. Morris Krakower lies motionless for minutes or perhaps seconds (who can measure time under such circumstances?). Then he reaches for the lamp and turns it on. Now he is past fear. He picks up the blanket, which has almost completely fallen off the bed. He knows with an inner certainty that he will now be left alone. This was Comrade Damschak’s way of forcing him to look at his phantom. But how? And why? How can this be understood? It defies scientific explanation. Like food stuck in the throat, which can’t be swallowed or coughed up, it fixes a question in Morris’s mind that can be neither answered nor dismissed. His brain falls still. For the first time in his memory, he is entirely without thoughts, as if his mind were suspended in a vacuum. He is cold, but he doesn’t cover himself. He has one hope—that the whole thing was a dream. But something tells him that he knows the difference between dreaming and reality. He glances at the clock on the night table—it is a quarter past three. He holds the clock to his ear and listens to its inner mechanism at work. Outside, a trolley car passes by, and he can hear the scraping of the wheels. Reality still exists. For a long time, Morris sits in his bed without an idea, without a theory—a Leninist who has just seen a ghost. Then he stretches out, covers himself, and lays his head on the pillow. He doesn’t dare turn out the light, but he closes his eyes. “Well, what does one do now?” he asks himself, and he can find no answer. He falls asleep, and when he wakes up again he knows the answer: it was all a dream. If that were not the case, he, Morris Krakower, would have to surrender everything: Communism, atheism, materialism, the Party, all his convictions and commitments. And what would he do then? Turn religious? Pray in the synagogue? There are facts that a man must disown, even to himself. There are secrets one must take to the grave. One thing is clear: the real Damschak was not here, because his body is in Russia. What Morris saw was a mental image, which his brain had for some reason constructed. Perhaps it was because Morris and Damschak were close friends, and he hasn’t yet made peace with the fact that Damschak turned traitor in Russia. It is possible for a man to dream while awake. Morris Krakower falls asleep again. In the morning, when he raises the blinds, the sun bathes the room in light. The winter day is as bright as summer. Morris examines the blanket. He finds the marks that his fingers have left in the weave. The threads look as if they had been teased apart in places. So what does this prove? Undoubtedly, he really pulled the blanket. But the other end of the blanket reveals no sign of a struggle. The ghost has left no trace. The short speech that is delivered by Comrade Krakower that evening lacks the logic, certainty, and smoothness of the one he gave the previous day. He stammers occasionally; he makes errors. He keeps removing the pince-nez from his nose and replacing them. The essence of his speech is that at the present time there is only one revolutionary party: the Communist Party. The main organ of the Party is the Central Committee, its secretariat. To doubt the Party is to doubt Marx, Lenin, Stalin, the ultimate triumph of the proletariat—in other words, to go over to the camp of capitalism, imperialism, fascism, religion, superstition. ♦ (Translated, from the Yiddish, by Aliza Shevrin.) Sign up for the daily newsletter.Sign up for the daily newsletter: the best of The New Yorker every day. E-mail address GO SIGN UP Share Tweet

Of course I’d seen them, his customers, walking past the diner and thrift shop and firehouse clutching their oil-stained kraft-paper sacks—dishevelled and outdoorsy, these people, healthy-looking in an unpremeditated way, their skin unblemished and tanned and their muscles toned. You wouldn’t catch them doing sports, but you might see a pair of them walking down the shoulder of a county highway in big floppy hats; you might encounter a group out in the woods in summer, casually fording a stream in technical sandals. They had money, which they appeared rarely to spend. Their glasses were likely to have hinged clip-on sunshades attached; the books in their satchels came from the public library. These people had no name. Though they were many in our town, they didn’t self-identify; the idea would have seemed silly to them. But the Breadman brought them together in this otherwise nonwhite, working-class neighborhood every Friday morning. It was the only way to get the bread—or, as my wife liked to call it, the Bread. You had to come here, to this little tchotchke shop that shared an entrance with the children’s used-clothing store, where the Breadman set up his table at precisely ten-thirty—or, rather, half an hour before that, if you wanted to get the focaccia, which couldn’t be reserved beforehand, and was bestowed only upon the prompt. But I’m getting ahead of myself. I wouldn’t have come here on my own in a million, billion years. I liked the bread, but not that much. My wife sent me. She had a cold. That’s why this happened. Of course I was late. Which is to say, ten minutes early. There were thirty people in line ahead of me—men and women, but mostly women. Young to middle-aged, but mostly middle-aged. I am middle-aged. But the Breadman’s people had the comfortable, self-possessed air of travellers from some great distance, who had at last arrived at their ultimate destination. They chatted amiably but unostentatiously. They smiled and laughed. None of them looked at their phones. I did, because I was by myself, and because I lived most of my life at a distance from the things and people I loved. It was also a quality of mine that I invariably became the terminus of any queue I joined. I took a photo of the people ahead of me and uploaded it onto the Internet, along with the caption “Standing in the bread line! What is this, Soviet Russia?” A couple of minutes later, I deleted it. Pretty soon, the Breadman arrived with his assistants. I’m trying to say that without particular emphasis, because I don’t like the Breadman and want to downplay his star power. But it was quite an entrance. He pulled up to the curb in a red boxlike van that resembled an oven, to gentle applause from the customers. The panel door rolled open, and a couple of stringy, deeply tanned kids in their twenties—a boy and a girl—hopped out and, wearing serious expressions, unloaded the Breadman’s gear: a folding table, a cash box, a stool, several large hinged wicker baskets, a freestanding wooden sign with “MANNA” painted on it in a bubbly but somehow pedantic script, and then underneath, in precise all-caps sans serif, “QUALITY BREADS.” The kids made two trips into the tchotchke shop before the Breadman emerged, and when he did, ambling around the snout of the van while distractedly riffling through pages fixed to a clipboard, a chorus of greetings went up from the crowd. “Anton! Anton!” The Breadman looked up as though surprised. He smiled, gave a little wave. “Hello, everybody! Thank you for coming. We’ll be set up in just a moment.” He was my age, but much better-looking and much more at ease in his own skin. That skin was white, of course, which is not to say pale; it was as if he had been brushed with egg white and baked to an even brown. He wore outsized eyeglasses with black plastic frames over vaguely Semitic, bookish features, and his black hair and beard were shaggy and flecked with gray. The gray made him more handsome. His short-sleeved silk shirt was also black, and dusted with flour, as were his tailored jeans. The flour seemed a bit theatrical to me—yes, he was a baker, but were these the clothes he baked in? I suspected it had been sprinkled there intentionally, as a marker of artisanal legitimacy. His feet were bare. It was unclear to me why the tchotchke shop had been chosen as the pickup point. It was situated far from where the Breadman’s customers were likely to live, in a neighborhood that, while quite safe by city standards, was nevertheless the staging ground for most of our town’s violent crimes. For that matter, I didn’t know why the tchotchke shop had chosen this location in the first place; I never saw anybody shop there. It seemed to be some kind of craftspeople’s collective, though all the merchandise looked the same—faux-primitive renderings of semirural small-town life on coffee mugs, greeting cards, T-shirts, and, in what could only be seen as a deliberate effort to deter potential buyers, mouse pads. In any event, all of this had now been pushed aside, presumably by the assistants, to accommodate the ingress of the Breadman’s customers. Since I was last in line, I spent the first ten minutes of the selling period in the store’s unventilated glass vestibule, enduring the magnified summer heat. I texted my wife: doors open. don’t forget the focaccia, she texted back. that’s a kind of coffee right, I replied. pls just get it. Looking at that exchange now—I have never deleted a text—I can see that trust was the issue. She didn’t trust me and never had. Which is not to say that I blame anyone but myself for what was to happen. I was sweating: marshy pits, swamp ass. The women who had been first in line now edged past me on the way out, keeping as great a distance between us as they could in the elevator-size space, assisted by their giant paper sacks of the Bread, focaccia poking out of the top. Chuckles and smiles. “Pardon me.” “Pardon me!” The line accordioned; I emerged into the tchotchke shop. I picked up, fondled, a coffee mug made to resemble a terra-cotta flowerpot. “TEN SQUARE MILES OF HAPPY!” read a bold legend superimposed above the silhouette of our county. To an outsider, the silhouette wouldn’t look like anything much at all: a chip of old latex paint, a torn postage stamp. But an outsider would never buy this mug, except ironically. Now that I was inside, the air-conditioning cooled the sweat patches on my clothes, and I began to shiver. Luckily, there was coffee here, at the front of the line. It came from the coffee shop down the block, and was contained within a mailbox-size waxed-cardboard tote. A stack of paper cups stood beside it, and an aluminum honor box labelled “$1” with a sticky note. Beside that lay an important thing that I had forgotten about: the clipboard. If you wanted the Bread, you had to sign in—specifically, to print your last name and first initial on the neatly hand-ruled table provided. Then you added your signature and your account number. My wife had explained this process to me, and we had rehearsed it together. “51093,” I said. “Say it again. 51093.” “51093.” “Just write it down. You’re going to forget it.” “51093,” I said. “I don’t need to write it down! 51093.” Of course I remember it now, but I didn’t remember it then. I texted her, account number?, and then, after a moment’s thought, added, :)

This happened here in our town. A friend of mine—we were on the cheerleading team together—married a local farmer, and right away they wanted to have a baby, though the doctor said she shouldn’t. She was a bleeder, he said, and if she started he might not be able to stop it. But she didn’t listen. She went ahead and got pregnant, then bled to death during childbirth and was buried out by the farmhouse, under a crabapple tree. It was very sad. I cried for a week. But the baby survived, a pretty little boy; his dad called him Dickie-boy, but I don’t know if that was his real name. His dad was a hard worker and a nice guy—I went on a movie date with him once when we were young—but he sometimes drank too much and he was hopeless at ordinary household chores and raising babies. So pretty soon he found another wife, either through a dating service or else he picked her up in one of his bars somewhere, because none of us girls knew her. She was a tough, sexy lady, a hooker, maybe. She made no effort to be one of us or to make us like her. I guess she considered us beneath her. We called her the Vamp. She got around, and it was said that she’d taken half the men in town to bed, my own ex included. They all denied it, like cheating husbands do, but, when the subject came up, little shit-eating grins would appear on their faces and their eyes would glaze over as if they were remembering the wild time they’d had. Maybe Dickie-boy’s dad knew about all that, and maybe he didn’t. He was mostly either drunk or out in the fields, and he left the raising of the kid to his new wife. He loved Dickie-boy to the extent that the child reminded him of his dead wife, but resented him for the same reason, just as he resented the boy’s mother for selfishly dying on him. He had hoped for a sturdy fellow to help around the farm, but Dickie-boy was a sickly, fine-boned child who had trouble lifting a finger to pick his nose, forget pitchforks and shovels. Certainly he didn’t get on with the Vamp, who had a mean temper and slapped him around, with or without an excuse. The Vamp had a daughter from a previous relationship, a cute kid with big dreamy eyes, called Marleen. I never knew what to make of her. Marleen seemed to live in a storybook land of her own. When she spoke, she spoke to the world, the way singers do, and what she said seldom made any sense. You probably had to be a kid to understand her at all. My little girl—she’s a young woman now and has her own little girl—was the same age as Marleen, and sometimes the two of them played together, my daughter pedalling her bike out to the farm and back, or sometimes I took her and picked her up. My daughter had a lot of stories about Marleen, but I didn’t always understand those, either. Marleen settled right in with her new little stepbrother. They were as tight as crib siblings and had a way of talking to each other that didn’t use words. My daughter said it might be bird talk, which Marleen had offered to teach her. Some people said that Dickie-boy wasn’t all there, others that he had something almost magical about him. Once, for example, he somehow crawled up onto the barn roof, and they had to call the Fire Department to get him down. The fire marshal said he had no idea how the boy could have got up there, unless he flew. Marleen said he did it because the birds wanted him to. She told my daughter that the crabapple tree had helped him, though it was over near the house, not the barn. I had no idea what she meant. My daughter didn’t know, either, and Marleen never announced it in her peculiar way of speaking. My daughter and Marleen played dolls and house and nursie, just like all little girls do, and sometimes they used Dickie-boy in their games. In nice ways and maybe not-so-nice ways. Strange Marleen might get up to anything, and my own daughter had a mischievous and curious streak, so things probably happened. Kids are kids, after all. I figured it was best to mostly look the other way. Children have to be allowed to grow up on their own—I’ve always believed that. Marleen wanted a doggy, for example, so she put a collar and a leash on Dickie-boy and walked him around on his hands and knees with his clothes off and did circus tricks with him. She even taught him to wee with his leg in the air. He never complained. When he did bad things, like biting the mailman or pooping on his stepmother’s bed, Marleen swatted his behind with a rolled-up newspaper just as you would a puppy. Then he’d whimper until she scratched between his ears and gave him a cookie. My daughter said that Dickie-boy seemed to do bad things on purpose so as to get swatted. I suppose he was just looking for attention, given the kind of parents he had. His dad was never around, and the Vamp hated him, so all he had was Marleen and her games. Dickie-boy wasn’t very healthy, but whenever he got sick Marleen made him well again. It was a gift she had. It sometimes worked on others, too. One time, my daughter had a bad case of tonsillitis, and I thought her tonsils would have to come out, but Marleen somehow brought her fever down and she hasn’t had tonsillitis since. Marleen couldn’t do anything for my ingrown toenail and canker sores, though. Dickie-boy had gifts, too, and one of them was finding lost things. Once, I lost an earring, and my daughter brought Marleen and Dickie-boy over to the house to find it. He got down on all fours with his face near the floor, and Marleen showed him the matching earring and made a chirping noise that probably meant “Fetch!,” because that’s exactly what he did. It had fallen into one of my old sneakers in the closet. He also found a nail brush I didn’t even know was lost. Hide-and-seek wasn’t any fun at all, my daughter said, because Dickie-boy always went straight to where they were. Same with blindman’s bluff—it was as if he could see right through the blindfold. And ghost-in-the-graveyard, if you played it at night, could be downright scary, because he could give you the feeling that he was there and not there at the same time. Marleen could be scary, too. Whenever she was around, staring her wide-eyed stare and talking aloud to nobody in particular, I kept stumbling and dropping things. My daughter said the same thing happened to their schoolteacher, who sometimes sent Marleen out of the room so she could clear her head. Marleen often played with Dickie-boy the way you’d play with a rag doll, tossing him floppily about, dangling him by an arm or leg, he looking glassy-eyed and like he’d lost his bones. It was funny, really. They could have taken the act on television. Playing with Dickie-boy like a rag doll was my daughter’s favorite game. Then, one day, when Marleen was dragging him around by his soft ankles, his head broke off. That scared my daughter. She came home crying, though eventually she went back again. Marleen told her that her mother hated Dickie-boy and had cut his head off and then glued it back on without telling Marleen, so that the head would come off again while they were playing and she’d be blamed for it. But the police chief, who went to investigate the death, told me that, after talking with the boy’s folks, he was convinced it was just a tragic household accident that the little girl was inventing wild stories about. The boy was buried alongside his mother under the crabapple tree, and that was also sad, but the little boy had never quite seemed part of this world in the first place, so it wasn’t as sad as when his mother died. Buy the print » I’d been seeing the police chief on and off since my husband left me. Even before, if truth be told. He was sweet and was sometimes fun to be with, but mostly he wasn’t, being something of a nail-chewing worrywart by nature. I could see why his wife had left him. The fire marshal was more fun and never worried about anything, but he’d already had three wives and he said he didn’t want any more. He preferred booze to broads now, as he put it, and—more than either—the weekly football on the box. The police chief had been a senior when I was just a freshman. We did some things together back then, but I was still very young and shy, and I guess, thinking back, he was, too. He was a Catholic and I was a Lutheran, so it wouldn’t have worked out anyway. We were both still churchgoers, so nothing was going to work out now, either, but, at this time of life, that was no longer enough to keep two lonely people out of the same bed. A few weeks after Dickie-boy died, my daughter went out to the farm one day and found Marleen sitting beside a hole in the ground under the crabapple tree, playing with a pile of bones. Marleen said that the bones were those of her stepbrother, whom her mother had cooked up in a black-beer stew, which her stepfather ate, gnawing all the little bones clean before burying them. Marleen had dug them up and was stringing together a kind of horrible life-size Halloween puppet. She was reciting a rhyme about singing bones, and then she warbled like a bird and held up the bone puppet and rattled it. That was when my daughter stopped playing with her. There has to be a law against those sorts of things, but when I told the police chief what my daughter had said he only bit his nails and said that it was weird how kids could dream up such crazy stories. I asked him if he didn’t think it could be true, or at least partly true, and he said no, he knew the parents well, especially the girl’s mother, and such a thing could not have happened. I realized then that, like half the town’s heroes, the chief had probably been one of the Vamp’s quickies, maybe still was. He wasn’t interested in any further speculation about the girl he called “that cute little loony with the big eyes.” He did promise to drop by the farm to see if the grave had been molested, but he never told me if he did. The part of Marleen’s story that I thought might be true was how Dickie-boy had died. The Vamp, who’d detested her stepson, was completely capable of doing him grievous bodily harm, as the chief would say, in his detective-movie way, and then making her daughter feel guilty for it. There was something monstrous about her—we all felt it. Of course, she’d messed up a lot of our marriages, so we weren’t exactly unbiased. I didn’t think that Dickie-boy’s dad would have eaten him on purpose, but he was often so drunk that he didn’t know what he was doing, and maybe the Vamp had tricked him into it. Stews are stews. Who knows what’s in them? The fire marshal told me that he’d been drinking one night with Dickie-boy’s dad, who’d complained that people misunderstood his wife. She had her dark side, sure—who didn’t? But mostly she was just frightened and needed protection, and he could provide that. Dickie-boy’s dad wasn’t feeling well, ulcers or something, and he said he knew that whiskey wasn’t a cure for it, but he was a farmer who did certain things every day by the clock. Drinking every night was part of that routine, and he couldn’t change it now. But it meant that his wife was alone much of the time, and being alone scared her, which was why she was constantly shacking up with other men. Everything scared her, he said. The farm scared her, the birds did, the animals, even the damned crabapple tree. She wouldn’t go near it. She kept glancing up over her head as if she were afraid that something might be falling on her. Then the fire marshal made the mistake of bringing up the rumor about the black-beer stew and took a nose-breaking blow to the face, and that was the end of their drinking together. Dickie-boy’s dad died a year after Dickie-boy, almost to the day, and joined him and the boy’s mother under the crabapple tree. The doctor said that he drank too much and ruined his liver, and that was maybe so, but he got sick and died awful fast. The Vamp didn’t even stick around for the funeral, as though admitting what she’d done, but the police chief refused to order an autopsy on the farmer. He said that it wasn’t in his jurisdiction, so we’ll never know for certain. That the Vamp had killed her stepson, poisoned her husband, abandoned her daughter, and gone on the run was the general opinion, but my daughter said she wasn’t so sure. She wondered if Marleen’s mother wasn’t also out there under the crabapple tree. At the father’s funeral, Marleen told my daughter that she was sorry she’d stopped coming to play with her, but it was all right, because her stepbrother had come back alive from the bones she’d joined up, and they were playing together just like before. The boy’s grave was covered over by dirt and weeds and looked like it always did. Maybe Marleen was making up stories because she was lonely and wanted my daughter to be her friend again, but it didn’t work. As far as my daughter was concerned, enough was enough. Anyway, she was too grown up by then to play Marleen’s weird games. I’ve never seen any phantom boy, of course, though my daughter said she “sort of” saw him, “in a ghost-in-the-graveyard kind of way,” when she was out riding past the farm one night with a boyfriend. Eventually, Marleen inherited the farm, which wasn’t exactly a farm anymore. She had started keeping birds and other animals out there, turning the place into something of a wildlife refuge. Maybe her imaginary Dickie-boy was part of the wildlife. Some of the animals lived in the house with her. In fact, there wasn’t much difference between inside and outside. There was no money in a wildlife refuge, of course, so, as she grew older, Marleen took up what we all supposed had been her mother’s trade, but as if living in a story about herself, without awareness or consequence, a sort of rag-doll act of her own. The fire marshal was getting fat eating carryout from fast-food joints, so he changed his mind about no more wives and agreed to marry me if I’d promise to cook him decent low-cal meals. I could do that, and it gave me a kind of future. His brief attempts at lovemaking were more like ballgame time-outs, always had been, but at least he hadn’t abandoned the practice altogether. Marleen had aroused his curiosity, and he decided to try her out as his stags’-night treat before our wedding, and, a wag by nature, he joked about it with all our friends. I told him to be careful, because people had a way of disappearing around Marleen. He didn’t disappear. He came back and we got married. But he didn’t say anything about what had happened that night, and, in fact, never said much of anything again. He still went nightly to the bars to sit over his beers, smiling in a nervous sort of way and muttering to himself as if he were running through something in his mind. He retired from the Fire Department. Stopped watching football. Said it wasn’t “real,” but agreed that probably nothing else was, either. Over the years, we got used to thinking of Marleen as something eerie but mostly harmless at the edge of our lives. Children would sneak close to the crabapple tree, but, like the Vamp, they’d never go under it. They made up stories about the dead bodies buried beneath it, mostly to scare the younger ones. Once, somebody tried to set fire to the tree—it looked like a professional job, and the fire marshal hadn’t had his heart attack yet, so maybe he was involved. To protect the tree, Marleen had an extension built onto the farmhouse, with a hole in the roof for the tree, or perhaps it moved in on its own. Its apples were said to be poisonous, but birds gathered in its laden branches like twittering harpies to eat them, and, if anything, they got louder and bigger, and there were more of them than ever.

The landline was mewling again in the kitchen, obliging Pell Munnelly, woke now for good, to climb from the cozy rut of her bed and pad downstairs in bare feet. She skimmed her fingertips along the dulled gray-and-lilac grain of the walls, swatted each light switch she passed to feel less alone. On the phone was the secretary from her little brother Gerry’s school. The secretary was named Lorna Dawes, a pretty blond sap Pell sometimes saw around town. Another fight, Sap said: Gerry and two lads in the basement locker rooms before first class, an argument escalating to blows, and now Gerry was being detained in Sap’s office until such time as someone could come pick him up. The receiver was hot against Pell’s ear. There was snow in the back garden, a radiant pelt of the stuff with dark, snub-bodied birds dabbing across it. She lifted a foot from the lino, pressed dorsal and toes into the flannelled warmth of her standing calf. “Hello?” Sap said. “Well, guess that’d be me,” Pell said. Upstairs, she raked sleep knots and static electricity from her hair. She threw on three layers and an old combat jacket of Nick’s, salvaged a knitted hat malodorous with scalp sweat from the boiler room, and slammed the front door. The snow in the concrete courtyard was still faintly cut with the tread-mark arcs of Nick’s departed Vectra. Nick lived here in as small a way as he could. He was gone by first light and did not come back until near midnight. But he was the eldest, twenty-five and the state-sanctioned boss ever since the folks died off of cancer over consecutive summers, the mammy three years back, the daddy the year before last. Pell rang Nick on her mobile, counted to eight while the line rang out as she knew it would, sent a text. Then a second, more considered text: said not to worry, she’d bail the lump out herself. Transport was a problem. Pell’s breath smoked in the air. A horse, a runty juvenile skewbald, gawped at her from the field next to the house and flicked its filthy tail. “You are no candidate,” Pell said. A field farther on was Swanlon’s bungalow, the Munnellys’ nearest neighbor. Pell discerned a bloom of chimney smoke, faint as a watermark against the white sky. Swanlon was a pensioner with a metal hip, his only earthly companion the rowdy black bitch of a Border collie he doted upon. Pell knew she could sweet-talk Swanlon into giving her a lift, though he would insist on bringing the dog, which he permitted to ride in passenger, having successfully conditioned the beast to wear a seat belt. But Pell knew that driving had become a fretful ordeal for the old man. Besides, Gerry would go spare if Swanlon’s rusting wreck of a car, parping cloudlets of straw and dung out the exhaust, came up the school drive to collect him. So Pell walked the quarter mile out to the main road. Town was seven miles away. She skirted the barbed spokes of the briars clustered along the road’s verge. Across the fields, a row of pylons curved away into the haze. After a while, she heard a vehicle, turned to see a county bus approaching. She stepped into the middle of the road and started waving. The bus heaved to a halt. The driver, Mac Reddin, tut-tutted as Pell stamped her boots in the stairwell and thumbed her mam’s expired bus pass from her wallet. “You look like a cooked prawn, Pell,” Reddin said. There were three elderly women on board. They smelled like the inside of kettles in need of descaling. Pell sat away from them. The warm bus wended through the countryside and Pell drowsed in her seat, her drooping forehead scuffing the wet window and starting her back awake. In Swinford, Pell watched a skinny dark girl in a leather jacket and wool hat bunch an infant to her chest and attempt to collapse, one-handed, an uncollapsing stroller before tossing the thing, splayed and sideways, into the bus’s undercompartment. In Foxford, three lads got on, schoolboys. Pell was sixteen, and they were about the same. They shambled down the aisle, jackets open and school ties wrenched loose, at this hour brazenly on the doss. Boys interested Pell. They were what she missed most about school, watching them and being among them. She liked their creaturely excitability, their insistence, in one another’s company, on shouting almost everything, almost all the time. She liked their unwieldy bodies—their hands like hammers and their loaflike feet, the way their Adam’s apples beat like the chests of trapped birds when they talked at her. At, not to. Pell had already deciphered the difference: most lads were too afraid to talk to her, and instead just blustered into her vicinity. There were also the boys who barely spoke at all, and these were the ones Pell liked best; the lads who were lean, with long arms and intricately veined wrists, who could stand to inhabit a silence for three seconds in a row. Steven Tallis, the lad at the rear of this pack, was such a specimen. A comely six-foot string of piss, faintly stooped, with shale eyes darting beneath a matted heap of curly black fringe. He shied from looking her way, of course. In the middle was one of the Bruitt boys, the scanty lichen of an unthriving mustache clinging to his lip. Paddy Guthrie, out in front, was stubby and pink and loudly yammering without looking at the two in tow. He was the ringleader, the smart-mouth. They passed her and slung themselves into seats a few rows behind. There was an interval of scuffling noises, snickering, a distinctly aired cunt or bollocks or shudafagup, followed by a bout of intensive communal muttering. Then a shunt and a rattle as a body cannoned into the frame of the seat immediately behind Pell’s. “Hey. Hey, you.” It was Guthrie. Pell smelled beer on his breath. “Hey,” he said again. “What?” Pell said. “You’re Nicky Munnelly’s sister, yeah?” Pell nodded. “And Gerry, Gerry’s sister, yeah?” “Uh-huh.” “Gerry’s all right, isn’t he, a header, but good for a laugh in the end,” Guthrie said. “And the fella Nick—what used they call him, the Prowler, yeah, back in the day? Me brother Joe came up with him, said he used to torment the priests in there something wicked, broke their hearts every second day. And shagged anything that moved around town.” Guthrie’s face blinked at her. Pell watched his thin, bright lips pull apart. “What do you mean, saying that about my brothers?” she said. “Ah no, I respect the fuck out of them,” Guthrie said. “But, like, they’re a line of hellions, the lads out your way, in’t they?” “Lads are clowns,” Pell said, and sighed. “You and your mouth-breathing bum chums included.” Guthrie laughed. “Where you going?” he said. “Town.” “No shit. Whereabouts and whyfor?” “Where are you going?’’ Pell shot back. “Why aren’t you in school?” “You know Tallis? His ma’s away, so we were back in his place. There’s all this drink in the shed. The generous mare don’t mind us having a couple the odd weekend, but we sneak a few extra now and then on the sly, in between, like this morning.” He licked his lips again. “Bit of a buzz on, and now we’re, well, we’re heading back to school for the afternoon. Dossing gets boring, you know, trying to come up with stuff to actually fucking do.” “You were on the doss, and now you’re heading back into school?” Pell said. “Correct,” Guthrie said. “For P.E. and art class. Handy numbers. Ginty, the art teacher, lets us listen to whatever we want on our iPods, long as we agree to ‘draw our feelings.’ A soft goon but an all-right one, Ginty. But, hey, you still out of school yourself like?” Pell shrugged. “Well for some, eh? You ever going to go back?” The bus was in town now. Farther along the quays, set behind a stone wall and a tree line, was the boys’ school. Pell could see the slated peaks of the main building emerging from the crowns of the trees. “It’s where I’m headed right now,” Pell said, smiling, already bored with Guthrie. Nick Munnelly was standing in an alley in the cold at the rear of the Bay Pearl hotel, smoking and picking at the threads, the linty specks, snarled in the hairs of his forearm. It was something to do. Against the opposite wall of the alley was a dumpster brimming with bin bags. On the cobbled ground were crushed Styrofoam cups, plastic baggeens, and shreds of newspaper so snow-sodden they did not stir in the wind. Nick cuffed a boot heel against the doorway’s concrete step. The side of his face was rashing into numbness. He was in a T-shirt and a spattered apron. He worked in the hotel kitchen, a muggy, febrile space where the staff sweated through shifts stripped to single layers. The other smokers took their breaks inside, huddled beneath the grille of a ventilation shaft in an old storage room. Nick preferred the open alley, with its ripe rankness and keening draft. The cold was a pleasure to him because he could absent himself from its effects at any moment. But not yet: the true pleasure of relief, like any pleasure, was in its anticipation. Being able to go inside afterward would be better than having stayed inside in the first place. Sean the Chinaman poked his head out the door. “I’m packing heat—and my dental records, just in case.”Buy the print » “Jaysus, lad, it’s nippy,” Sean said. Nick said nothing. “Your kids are here.” Nick looked at Sean. “Boy and a girl?” “Yeah,” Sean said. “A boy and a girl.” Sean’s actual name was Heng Tao Chen. He changed it because Irish people couldn’t handle the pronunciation. This mildly incensed Nick. Any grown human who couldn’t manage Heng, just Heng, after a few sincere attempts was being a purposefully ignorant fuck. Nick tried to explain this to Sean, but Sean, diplomatic as the woefully outnumbered must always be, said that he was happy to go with Sean. It was what some people did when they came over, he said, picked a native name. A Chinaman called Sean. It was funny, Nick thought, sly on Heng’s part. “Nick?” Nick shook his head and smiled. “That’s my bro and sis, you daft cunt. What age do I look?” They were in the lounge, weather dripping from their jackets onto the shitty carpet. It needed replacing, but so did everything. The hotel was dying on its hole. Nick told them to sit, and they each took a leather chair by the street window. The chairs were too big for them, the leather creaky with disuse. Gerry climbed into his head first, pausing on his hands and knees like a dog before righting himself in the squeaking seat. He had a gunked lip, a yellow plume on his cheek, a nostril rimmed with crusting red. Nick looked at his little brother. “Stop being a fucking prick,” he said. Gerry slumped down. Nick saw that he was dazed. The adrenaline churned up by the fight had all ebbed away. Nick remembered the feeling, the rinsed muscles, the warm quiver of shot nerves. There was no point interrogating Gerry as to what had happened, or why. It didn’t matter. Someday, someone was going to beat sense into the little snot, and Nick knew only that it was not going to be him. “I was flat out here,” Nick said. Pell dabbed at her wet nose with the cuff of her, no—it was Nick’s combat jacket. “I know,” she said. “You know what I’m like with the fucking phone. But next time give them my number.” “You’re not going to answer.” “No. But let that be those cunts’ problem. That’s what they’re paid for.” Nick glanced at the bar clock. “Sean, be a doll and get the kitchen to fix this pair—what you want? Chips, burgers?” “Curry chips and a quarter-pounder with cheese,” Gerry said immediately. “Pell?” Pell was looking out the window. “The same.” “My lunch ain’t due till three, but I can probably clear out before that,” Nick said. “Eat that shit first and I’ll drop you home.” Nick went back through the kitchen and out again into the alley. There had been a minute left on his smoke break, and, with the sensation of tears boiling behind his eyes, he smoked that minute out. “Bambi on ice,” Nick said. He was driving, Pell in passenger. Gerry was in back, asleep, or feigning it. All the morning’s excitability over, the little wanker was enjoying the bonus of having the afternoon off and the additional impending idleness of however many days of suspension the school decided to deal down. Pell was brooding, chin tucked into her shoulder, eyes fixed out her window. On the way to the car, she’d stepped off the pavement and gone down on her arse on the ice. Gerry, in his post-scrap stupor, had come to life, clapping and chanting, “Get up, Pell, get up, Pell,” as she rocked back and forth. Nick had let this performance go for thirty seconds before lifting a boot and glancing Gerry’s knee, sending him clattering against the bonnet of a nearby car. Nick had not offered Pell a hand, because Pell would not have taken an offered hand. Instead, he’d grabbed her under her armpits and hauled her to her feet. “Leggo,” she’d growled. Nick watched the road. It was disorienting to be away from work at this hour. The afternoon sky was swamped with clouds, and the glare made the linings of his eyelids ache, all that dazzle piled to the low brink of the horizon. “Bambi on ice,” he said again. Pell acted tough. She was a bunched slip of a thing with a mouth that got vicious real fast. With her hackles up, she was liable to go for anyone. Whenever she came out with an exceptionally cutting remark, Nick wanted to take her in his arms and tell her, Your mammy and your daddy would be so proud. “Don’t be sulking, Bambi,” Nick said, laughing, and went to pet her brow. “Prick off,” Pell said, and swung at his shoulder. Without taking his eyes off the road, Nick grabbed her wrist and turned her limb toward her until he had Pell’s head pinned to the passenger window. Pell had a tiny fucking head for a sixteen-year-old human, Nick thought, and laughed as he felt its diminutive shape vibrate where it was trapped. Her free hand slapped at his braced arm. But up until he relinquished his grip—he wasn’t hurting her—Pell’s jaw remained taut, and she fumed through her nose but said no word, refused to beg to be let go. He slowed the car to a crawl in the yard, arced around, and, without waiting for the Vectra to come to a stop, the two opened their doors and timed their leaps clear. He completed the circle, watched them in the mirror. He bipped the horn. Neither looked back at him. Swanlon and his dog were standing at the gate of his house. Swanlon put out a claw, held it there. Nick pulled up. “How’s young Munnelly?” Swanlon said, his nostrils plugged with silvery, unkempt hair. “Sound. You?” The old man snorted, spat. “You not in work?” “Heading straight that way now. Had to drop that pair back.” “Young Gerry not in school?” “School’s not an arrangement he’s enthralled with just now.” “The scholarly burdens,” Swanlon said. “He’s a good lad, but.” “He is,” Nick said. “When he’s asleep.” Swanlon grubbed at the springy cartilage of the dog’s ear. He’d inherited the farm from his oul fella, decades back, had worked it here in tandem with his mother until she, too, died off. As far as Nick knew, Swanlon had never gone anywhere or done anything beyond tending to his acres. He was just an ailing, ancient sham who knew almost nothing about life. “And what about young Pell?” Swanlon continued. Nick ground his teeth. “What about her?” “I saw her stalking straight out that road this morning, head up. Looked like a soldier making off to war.” “That’s how she always looks.” “She should finish her schooling, too. She’s a sharp tack.” “I know, I know. But, the way I see it, that’s up to her.” Pell had been out of school for almost two months now. She’d started junior-cert year right after the da’s funeral. She hadn’t missed a day that Nick could recall, was eerily compliant through the year, then failed every single exam. This year, she was supposed to repeat, but when school started, back in September, she would not get out of bed. Just would not get out of bed. The third day, Nick, sick of appealing, barged into her room, grabbed her by the ankles, and began to walk backward. Pell, on her back, did not resist. She held his gaze and needed three stitches in her head where she’d hit the floor. “Ah, I know, but still,” Swanlon said. He shifted his gaze. “You up to your eyes in the job?” “Not particularly,” Nick said. “You’re hardly about.” Nick gulled his head. “You keeping tabs?” Swanlon smiled. “Not in an especial way. But what else have I to be doing?” Nick looked up at Swanlon. “I don’t know. I couldn’t imagine. There’s not so much as a square inch spare inside my head to ponder what it is you’d have to be doing with your time.” “All right,” Swanlon said. Nick angled his arm out the window. He watched the dog raise its gleaming snout to his palm. “Do they ever not look repentant?” he said. Gerry dismounted, hitched his horse to the post outside the Monteroy Saloon, and cycled through his weapons inventory, topping up the ammo in his twin revolvers and his Winchester repeater. The stars were out. Pianola notes drifted from the saloon’s double doors. Civilians walked the edges of the wide dirt street with their eyes on their shoes. Cicadas, crickets, whatever they were, ticked way out in the desert dark. Gerry, the flesh-and-guts boy, was lumped on his beanbag, the only light in his room the glow from the TV atop the dresser. His PlayStation wheezed on the floor at his slippered feet. The game was Blood Dusk 2. You played as Cole Skuse, an ex-Yankee soldier and mercenary. Right now, Gerry was about to attempt the rescue of Skuse’s love interest, a beautiful blond whore named Dora Levigne. She was being held hostage by the Cullen gang inside the saloon. Mission objective was get in there, ventilate as many of the Cullen boys as possible, and get her out. The Cullen faction was part of a larger horde of roving rapists, murderers, thieves, and scalp hunters led by a scarred brute known only as the Padre. The Padre was your true and final adversary, the man who, in the game’s prologue, had ordered the murder of your family. “Just curious: when, exactly, were you planning to tell me that you’re the product of a 3-D printer?”Buy the print » Gerry liked Blood Dusk 2, but was becoming less and less enamored of the repetitious, shootout-intensive missions you were obliged to complete in order to advance the plot. The game weighed things too much in your favor. You had unlimited lives, too many automatic save points, too nuanced and forgiving a targeting system for taking out your opponents. What was worth it, what kept Gerry coming back, was the game map. The map was gorgeous, two hundred square miles of simulated, fully interactable nineteenth-century North American frontier. While the missions tended to cluster in the towns and settlements that occupied only a small percentage of the game’s physical environment, Gerry had spent countless hours ranging through the enormous remainder of the map. He had discovered the remnants of Indian graves, chased down buffalo on an open plain, drunk moonshine with a benignly deranged prospector by the shore of a moonlit creek. The landscape teemed with wildlife and, to a lesser extent, other people, and you could, of course, shoot every living thing in the game, though Gerry refrained whenever possible. At sunset, he would goad his nag up the trail of a hill to watch the sinking rays cut across the cliff walls of a distant canyon, the ponderous flecks of vultures lagging in the thermals, circling something dying unseen on the canyon floor. . . . “Shhtburk.” “Hah?” Gerry said. “Shit. Brick,” Pell repeated from the doorway, looking down at Gerry. She was in Uggs and sweatpants, holding a glass with a clear liquid in it. Pell liked vodka, liked to lingeringly nurse thimblefuls of the stuff in the evening. Off school, and drinking when she liked: Pell had Nick under her thumb. The funny thing was that Nick, back before the folks croaked, had been mad for drinking, going out, and the general pursuit of hell-raising. Now he’d turned brutally sensible: worked every hour he could, stayed diligently sober, did not even bother with women anymore. “Yeah?” Gerry said. “I’ve made chops. Potatoes and a tiny, tiny little bit of veg, so we don’t all get scurvy. Will you have some, please?” “Not hungry,” he said, though he was, but somewhere amid the clutter of his room there was a half-full, party-sized tub of Pringles, likely still perfectly edible, that would do. “How’s the face?” Gerry shrugged, licked his lips. His saline made the tenderness of his split lip buzz. “Who’d you set on this time?” Pell said. “Or who was it set on you?” Keith Timlin. Now, Keith Timlin was a mate, but, like all of Gerry’s mates, the friendship was susceptible to these eruptions, and afterward Gerry could never work out whose fault it was, or account for the rapidity with which the mood had escalated from idle chat to banter to mock slagging and then to real, aggressive slagging. But Gerry liked Timlin! Gerry liked Timlin more than most! Certainly more than Shaughnessy, who all of a sudden had waded in on Timlin’s side and started sneering about the smell coming off Gerry. It was Shaughnessy who only a couple of weeks back had been getting reams of slagging mileage out of making fun of Timlin’s orthopedic shoe (the “clopper,” as Shaughnessy called it) and of Timlin’s admittedly ratty-looking features, his pinched snout and poky teeth. Gerry had been the one sticking up for Timlin then. “Danny Shaughnessy,” Gerry said. “There were two, though; your one Dawes said there was another lad involved. Was the other lad fighting you, too, or sticking up for you, or what?” “The other lad was with Shaughnessy. They were both against me.” “And did you start it?” Gerry shrugged. “I’ll take that as a yeah.” Gerry loathed being on exhibit like this, down on his fat arse, Pell looming above him. On the screen, Skuse idled in the street and kicked mindlessly at dirt clods, setting the spurs of his boots chiming. Gerry kept looking at the screen. “You can’t keep at that, Gerry,” Pell said. “Being an idiot.” “School is packed with dickheads.” “The world is packed with dickheads,” Pell said. “You’ve got to stop rising to them.’’ “I will,” Gerry said, just to get her to shut up. “You won’t,” she replied. “I will soon.” Gerry said nothing else, just waited until Pell slid from the doorway, then sprang up, banged the door, and returned to his beanbag. He grazed the “X” button with his thumb, and Skuse drew his pistol and braced into a firing stance. He strode into the Monteroy Saloon and blew away everything that moved. It got late. Gerry found the tub of Pringles and finished them off. The house quietened. Pell didn’t bother him again, and Gerry played on. Eventually, he heard a car. From his window, he could see that the yard light had come on. He stood up to look. The door of Nick’s Vectra was open, as was the boot. The car, parked at an untidy diagonal to the house, looked abandoned, ambushed. It was empty inside, welling with shadows. The yard light made the snow around the car unnaturally bright. Then his brother appeared, returning from the direction of the house’s front door. Gerry watched Nick, still in his white T-shirt and white work trousers, his breath trailing visibly from his mouth. Even the canvas sneakers he was wearing were white. Nick was drawing shopping bags from the boot. He must have been freezing, his shoes soaked. A wince flickered across Gerry’s features as he considered the lengthy detour his older brother would have had to make in order to accommodate so late a run for provisions: the twenty-four-hour petrol station on the Dublin road was the only place open this side of midnight, and it was five miles out the other side of town. He wished he liked his giant humorless prick of a brother more. Gerry heard shouts, gunfire, and turned back to the screen. He had forgotten to pause the game, and Skuse was taking hits. Dora Levigne had long been rescued and returned to the care of her madam, and Gerry, travelling onward from Monteroy to the northern town of Aristo, had meandered into a forested area, where he’d stumbled upon a Cullen encampment set into a treed thicket at the foot of a hill. Gerry had left Skuse crouched behind a wedge of rock in preparation for an assault, but now a number of the Cullen party had maneuvered behind him and were unloading their weapons into Skuse’s back. Gerry turned his avatar just in time to take a fatal shot to the torso, and the screen cut to black. In the black, words appeared: DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE? YES / NO Gerry growled. The game was so easy, it enraged him to die this cheaply. He felt like throwing the pad through the TV. He closed his eyes and breathed in, heard noises downstairs. He stepped over to the closed door. They were in the kitchen, Nick and Pell. Gerry had figured that Pell was in bed by now, but no, she’d either just gone back down or had been down there all this time. They were talking, though their voices were too faint and muffled to comprehend. Gerry got down onto his knees and pressed his face into the rancid fuzz of the carpet, the better to get his ear up to the half-inch horizontal gap between his door and the floor. He held his breath but still could not make out what they were saying. Nor could he reliably gauge their tone. He wondered, as all eavesdroppers do, if he was the subject under discussion: wee indolent tubs sitting on his hole upstairs and refusing to come out of his room. It might be something they could laugh about together, at least. There was a game Gerry liked to play, and he realized that he was playing it now: in his head, the muffled voices of his brother and his sister became the voices of his folks. It helped that he could barely recall what their voices had sounded like. The folks were growing vague to him. Sometimes, in the street, he would break out in a sweat as he registered, in the corner of his eye, the particular lanky stride of a man or the way a woman paused to slip the strap of a bag off her shoulder and rummage around for something, but then he’d look and, with a pang of utter relief, realize that there was no resemblance at all. With his parents safely dead, it was safe to imagine that they were not, and so he imagined descending the stairs, strolling in on not just Pell and Nick but the folks—the daddy unwizened, the mammy unwigged—seated at the kitchen table, grinning and abashed after their long and flagrant absence. They would look at Gerry, and in low, sincere voices he would instantly know as theirs, say, “Sorry for dying, son.” And Gerry would say, “That’s O.K.” Gladdened, and made generous by their remorse, he would turn to Pell and Nick and say, “Sorry for being an asshole today, lads.” And Pell and Nick would say, “That’s O.K., Gerry. We’re sorry for being assholes, too.” The fibres of the carpet pricked like tiny, finite flames against his face. After a while he had to get up, to relieve the pressure building between his temples. Gerry stood, and, as the blood descended from his head, flurries of bright-yellow and purple spots multiplied in the dark in front of his eyes. Five minutes ago, he had felt exhausted, ripe only for the pillow, but now he was electrically wakeful. He held the pad in his hand and watched the blinking spots fade away. In the dark, on the screen, the question remained. DO YOU WISH TO CONTINUE?

At a fire sale a few years ago, James MacPherson, a retired professor of politics at Wits, Johannesburg, known for his seminal work on the Frontline States’ war of attrition against the apartheid regime, bought a restaurant in Pretoria specializing in North African cuisine. His knowledge of Africa was extensive, a result of having lived in various places around the continent for a number of years, most notably Zambia and Tanzania, and of having travelled frequently to the neighboring states. Now he spends much of his time at a corner table in the restaurant, surrounded by the papers on which he has scribbled notes for a book he intends to lick into shape. He seldom interferes with the business side of the restaurant, allowing the manager, Yacine, a Moroccan, full authority to deal with most problems. And, on the rare occasion that Yacine seeks his input, James defers to him, saying, “It is your call.” James has thickened with age, gaining much weight. His once slim body has ballooned outward, and his paunch extends far ahead of him. His feet are swollen, as if he were diabetic. His doctor recommends regular workouts. And, because he does not feel sufficiently motivated to walk to the local gym, James has set up a mini-gym in the basement of his house. The last time he hired a personal trainer to come to his home, to help stretch his inflexible body, the young man spoke rudely to him, because he could barely bend forward to touch his toes. In addition, James has a weak left eye and he is forced, at times, to turn his entire body in order to catch sight of a person or a thing. James has the habit of arriving at nine in the morning, just as the restaurant is opening, not only because he loves the grainy coffee that the chef, a Turk, makes but also because he derives great joy from being in the restaurant and from the companionability of the young men and women who work in the offices nearby and come in for breakfast meetings. He revels in the bodies coming and going, and feels there is a purpose to the noisy activity here, a meaning to the bustle of waiters taking orders, chefs and sous-chefs preparing the food, and the manager doing the sums, printing the bills after payment, the customers engaging one another in conversation and, as is common among Africans, touching freely. James observes the young men with keener interest than he does their female colleagues or clients. He has lately, however, shown obvious keenness in one particular young man, who emerged from the staff door at lunchtime one day, carrying what looked to him like a doggie bag with food in it. Possibly the glimpse of the youth stirred something in James’s memory—he was a handsome fellow, with an uncanny likeness to the preteen son of a Somali family James had known in Tanzania. This family, from whom he used to buy his provisions, had owned a general store adjacent to James’s hotel. The boy’s father was exceptionally kind to James whenever he went round to the store, and the two would chat about Somali politics in broken Swahili. The mother, for her part, was by far the prettiest woman James had ever set eyes on. He became close enough to the family for the wife to invite him home for meals on festive occasions and for the husband to lend him cash a couple of times when a money order had been delayed. And, when James took ill and the hotel management did nothing, the boy’s father sent a Somali doctor to attend to him. James was so beholden to the boy’s parents that he could not bring himself to take advantage of the young thing on the various occasions when he and the boy were alone at the swimming pool to which he had invited him. James, though tempted, chose not to abandon himself to his unreasoning passion. He remembers all this now that he has learned from the kitchen staff that the young man he saw is, indeed, Somali. Eyebrows are raised, and the staff starts gossiping when, on subsequent days, James asks what the young man’s name is, what he does for a living, where he lives, and how long he has been in the country. The kitchen staff cannot seem to decide whether his curiosity is innocent or not, the Turk saying that James’s eyes light up, like those of a teen-ager in love, whenever Ahmed comes into view. One morning, on his way to the restaurant after a dentist’s appointment, James makes a detour, entering a nearby store, which Ahmed manages. It is not clear in James’s mind if he will speak to Ahmed, and, if he does, whether he will ask about Ahmed’s visits to the restaurant or find out if he is related to the young Somali boy James knew in Tanzania. James is a sensitive soul, and he is loath to infringe on anyone’s sense of privacy if he can help it; likewise, he won’t pester his employees with queries that might embarrass them. He just wants to have a feel for the store, and to make the young man’s acquaintance. Immediately, he can tell that there is no roaring business here. There are only five people in the place, two women in full-body tents and a third wearing headgear similar in style to a nun’s, and an old man sitting on a low stool who is chatting with the young man and occasionally helping to retrieve items that are placed high up in the stacks. James takes his time. He has no interest in purchasing any of the items on display. But he hangs around; he wants to exchange a few words with Ahmed in the proper manner, reasoning that he likes the look of the young man, loves the way he concentrates on what he is doing, and senses, too, that his movements are those of a young man who has said yes to hard work. James finds himself gazing at the fellow’s handsome face, his sweet smile, his delicately carved features. He is relieved to confirm that Ahmed is not the preteen, now a young man, to whose parents he was beholden in Tanzania, and of whom he had not taken advantage. He can now afford to think ahead to the day when he can fill his eyes with Ahmed’s naked body, given the chance. He wishes he were an artist and Ahmed a nude subject, posing to be drawn. Sadly, though, the clothes on Ahmed prove to be an encumbrance. They are so badly designed. What is more, the sleeves of his shirt are too short, and there is visible dirt around the neck, plus curry-type stains here and there, and the trousers are too baggy. The fellow could do with a cleaner set of clothes, laundered and pressed. James can’t recall seeing him wearing any clothes other than the ones in which he is now standing. But all that could be fixed in less than half an hour’s shopping—and James is prepared to foot the bill to dress him in clothes that would bring his features to the fore. Still, he doubts that their conversation today will move much beyond swapping names. Then, as luck would have it, and because James has stuck around longer than he initially intended to, he and Ahmed are alone and the young fellow is asking, “What can I sell to you?” James’s thoughts are suddenly cluttered with the detritus of memories, feelings for which he cannot find adequate explanation. Had he the guts to answer the question honestly, he might have replied that he was interested not in buying any of the trinkets and cheap clothes from China but in him, and only him. In other words, since everything has a price, how much would Ahmed’s “company” cost in monetary terms? How much to hold him in an embrace? “My name is James MacPherson,” he says. Then, smiling serenely, he moves a step closer. “Yes-hello-James-welcome,” the Somali says, speaking the words in such a way that James can’t help imagining that, in Ahmed’s head, they form a single hyphenated word. “What is your name?” “My name is Ahmed Ali-Mooryaan,” the Somali says. James, wanting to know how to address him, asks, “So, which is your Christian name?” “I have no Christian name.” James realizes right away that he has made a faux pas. And so, in an attempt to charm him, he offers his hand, formalizing the ritual of their encounter with a handshake. As he takes the young man’s slender hand—the hand of a pianist, James thinks—he expounds, “I know that you Somalis have one name, which is your given name, another which is your father’s name, and a third, which is your paternal grandfather’s. So whose name or nickname is Mooryaan?” James is aware that descriptive nicknames are often bestowed on people bearing the commonest of names. Presumably, there are thousands of men called Ali, and the idea is to distinguish one Ali from another. Hence Ali-Mooryaan. “My name is Ahmed.” “And your father’s name?” “His name is Ali. But everybody calls him Mooryaan.” James puts on the delightful smile of a man determined to redeem himself. “Mooryaan is a beautiful name, isn’t it?” “My dad is a beautiful man.” “A beautiful name for a handsome man.” “My dad is handsome, a man’s man.” James is uncertain what he means by this, but wonders if the phrase “a man’s man” is no more than a literal translation from Somali into English. And he lets it pass. However, he asks, “Is it an Arab name from the Koran or purely a Somali name?” James intends to impress Ahmed; he wants the young man to know that he has a modicum of knowledge about his traditions. “My father is famous in Mogadishu,” Ahmed says. James asks, “What is your father famous for?” “You say his name, everybody knows him.” Pressing, he repeats, “But what’s he famous for?” “Mooryaan is just a nickname.” “But what does Mooryaan mean, in Somali?” “Just a nickname between him and his friends,” Ahmed explains. “He is good-looking, and is now powerful, rich, and blessed with fifteen children— twelve boys, three girls—and four wives. Mooryaan is his famous nickname.” “And the nickname has stuck?” “Stuck, what means ‘stuck’?” James wonders if Ahmed’s command of the language becomes dishevelled whenever he feels ruffled. Or could it be that he has only “street English,” as an Arabic speaker might put it? “And what made you leave your father in Somalia and come to South Africa?” “South Africa is good, the best in Africa.” “But why not Europe or the U.S.A.?” “My applications were denied.” “Why?” “Politics,” Ahmed replies. “Politics, how?” “My dad upset America.” “To upset America, your dad must be a big man.” “In Somalia, he is big, my dad.” “How did you come here?” “There were five of us, and we started our journey from Mogadishu by plane to Nairobi,” Ahmed replies. “At Nairobi airport, we bribed the immigration officials. From there, we travelled to Tanzania, where we encountered lots of trouble, then more trouble, and were imprisoned. We were accused of illegally entering the country. Three of my friends were raped in prison, first by prison guards and then, again and again, by the prisoners.” “Why were you spared?” “Because I had money to give and I did.” “Then what happened?” “Four of us were allowed to leave.” “And the fifth?” “He is still in detention.” “Why?” “He is the second ‘wife’ of the prison warden.” “And from Tanzania you came to what country?” “Malawi, where we were also imprisoned.” “All four of you arrived together in Malawi?” “And two of us were not allowed to leave.” “Why were they refused permission to leave?” “They were raped in prison and detained.” “Again, you were spared. Why?” “I was lucky.” James doesn’t believe that luck spared him. But it is not surprising that Ahmed won’t admit to being raped. James knows, from having interviewed former political prisoners, that they all deny the truth of the physical and sexual humiliation they suffered at the hands of prison wardens or political commissars. “And then?” “After Malawi, Mozambique and then South Africa.” “Your English is very good,” James says. “Thank you.” “Have you learned it since coming here?” “No. I learned it in Somalia,” Ahmed replies. “I didn’t think that would be possible.” “You mean because we have a civil war?” “I understand that Arabic has been made the lingua franca there, and that even the use of Somali, a young tongue in terms of writing, has declined,” James says. Buy the print » Ahmed shakes his head and then explains, “My dad, he imported a teacher from Tanzania to teach us at home. He paid a good salary to the teacher—two hundred U.S. dollars a month. The teacher lived in our house. He was our family’s teacher, eight of us school-going-age children in one class.” “And where is your home?” “I come from Mogadishu,” Ahmed says. “I meant, where do you live now?” Ahmed points at the floor. “Here!” James is not shocked to hear that Ahmed lives, works, and sleeps in the store. He remembers how one morning he went to the restaurant unexpectedly early and found two of the North African waiters sleeping in the pantry, the sacks of onions, potatoes, and other items pushed into a corner to make space for one mattress that the two men shared. James has said nothing about it and continues to pretend that they live elsewhere. It did not occur to him that they might be homosexuals because they were sharing a single mattress; he thought, instead, that he should raise their salaries, even though he doubts that an increase would encourage them to rent an apartment—he knew that they were sending all their money back home. Anyhow, emboldened by his knowledge of what obtains among the migrants, James asks, “Here, where?” Ahmed points to a hidden corner beyond the shelves, where a mattress stands against the wall. James, needing to make himself taller for some reason, draws himself up, and then asks, “You are saying you work, live, and sleep here, and for food you collect the leftovers from my restaurant?” Ahmed looks offended, but James is unable to fathom why. His lips are astir—James thinks that he is having difficulty matching the thoughts in his head with the language at his command, is hesitating for fear that he may not make sense. Finally, Ahmed manages to speak. “You say ‘my restaurant’?” “Who did you think the restaurant belonged to?” “Yacine says the restaurant belongs to him.” “Oh, does he?” So that is what is happening, James thinks. Ahmed isn’t so much offended as surprised, having believed that the restaurant was owned by Yacine, thanks to whose generosity he was daily given the lunch leftovers. James remembers seeing a Senegalese film—he cannot recall the name of the filmmaker or the title—in which a young African in Paris, in the sixties, has a picture taken of himself leaning against a car parked in a street that he is sweeping. The young Senegalese sends the picture to his family, claiming the car as his own. No matter. The migrant is rich in imagination and, of course, the fact that Yacine claims to own the restaurant doesn’t bother James in the least. “You say he lying?” Again, James notices the way Ahmed’s control of English starts to slip, and he decides that it must happen whenever he becomes agitated or nervous. “I own the restaurant, every brick of it,” James now tells him. “Why lie? He is a bad man, Yacine.” “You’ll have to ask him yourself.” “I no like people lying,” Ahmed says. “Don’t concern yourself about it.” “Lying is like killing—no good.” James says, “Still, it is O.K. for you to continue taking your lunch from the restaurant. You have no worries about that. In fact, I’ll insist that they give you better food, healthier food.” “Thank you. Yes, I would like. Thank you.” But Ahmed still looks upset, and James cannot puzzle this out. James has to take care. The fellow is touchy. No Christian names and no questions pertaining to the lunch leftovers he takes away. Maybe it is time for James to go. He can come back, now that they have met, and perhaps they will arrange a convenient time to get to know each other better. No rush. “Well, I’ll tell you what, Ahmed,” James says. “What?” “I’ll see you another time. O.K.?” “O.K.” “Bye.” “Goodbye. Till another time.” Back at his table in the restaurant, James is momentarily overjoyed to recall his youthful courtship of his late wife, Martha. (Her Portuguese parents, living in Lourenço Marques, had named her Marta, but she added an “h” to Anglicize it.) He paid court to Martha, a fellow-student at the University of Cape Town, by pampering her with gifts, including gorgeous bouquets of flowers from a Rondebosch florist, and a birthday card delivered express, direct to her hostel. She was wafer-thin, with hair cut close to the head. James’s mother said that Martha wasn’t her idea of a woman or, for that matter, a mother and she thought that her son needed his head examined. She said, “How can you? The woman is a Twiggy manqué. At least the other one is English, famous, and a talented artist. What is good about this one?” James had retorted, “Who says every marriage has to produce a child?” You could have floored his mother with the softest touch—and she was shocked to hear him speak of marriage. “But I do. I want a grandchild, who will continue our line. Remember, darling. You are an only child and so am I, and, with your father dead, that will be the end of us.” He had shrugged off her comments, saying, “You make it sound as though this were a train, when you speak of the end of the line that way.” A number of things about Martha appealed to James: she had no local family to host her on weekends or holidays, and no one to worry about her if she didn’t come home but spent a few days at his apartment, in Claremont. Moreover, she was willing to go to his digs whenever he invited her. He would cook candlelit dinners and offer her wine galore, the best and the most sought after in the Western Cape. It was a mystery to him, though, that she could gorge herself on boxes of imported chocolates nightly without gaining a single ounce. How did she manage it when all he had to do to become thick in the waist like a tree trunk was hold a sliver of chocolate in his hand? Looking back now on his and Martha’s courtship, he finds that Ahmed’s accent is similar in an uncanny way to Martha’s. Her English was overlaid with Portuguese, which she never lost to her dying day, just as Ahmed’s English is plastered with Somali inflections, a feature that seems quaint to James, terribly charming and sexy. James is almost three times Ahmed’s age. There is time yet for him to find out how recently Ahmed arrived in the country and whether his refugee application has been approved by Home Affairs. There is time to discuss Ahmed’s plans for the future. And for James to consider his own. He lives all alone in a very big house, with only his dogs for company and a maid who comes during the day. There has been an eerie silence, ever since Martha died, two years ago. Of course there is room for Ahmed to join him. But not too fast—hey, not too fast, my man! First off, James alters Ahmed’s status at the restaurant. He tells Yacine that, from today onward, Ahmed is not to be treated as a poor relation, given a sandwich made from leftovers and the heel of a loaf, but that he is to be offered a cooked meal twice a day, at lunchtime and in the evening. Yet, although Ahmed receives the new dispensation with joy, the instruction from on high without consultation riles the manager, who feels affronted, and those in the kitchen’s lower order who had until then shown Ahmed only kindness are piqued into an unprecedented meanness, because they suspect him of having complained to their boss. On the second day of the new arrangement, the meal the chef cooked was too salty and almost inedible, and his tea had in it milk that was past its consumption date. Ahmed takes ill the following day, his stomach runny. He spends a great deal of time going from the store to the shared outhouse toilet and back, and decides to close for the day. All the while, his vision is blurred. He rings his Somali friends, who suggest that he buy tablets for diarrhea and aspirin for his headache, which he does, but these are of no great help. So he leaves a handwritten message on the door that says “Bak tomoro!” and returns to bed. Ahmed’s no-show surprises James, for he has looked forward to seeing him and to hearing how delighted he is by the arrangement James has made for him. Early the following morning, on his way to his table at the restaurant, he stops in at the store to find Ahmed looking wan and withdrawn. He asks what is the matter, and Ahmed replies, “Food poison.” James takes him to his own doctor in his car, wondering what to do about the chef and the kitchen staff, and wondering, too, if Yacine is in on this. He won’t rush into anything; he is well aware that Yacine has a short temper, and that there is no point in confronting any of the kitchen staff unless it happens a second or a third time. While waiting for the results from the clinic, James and Ahmed retreat to a café across the street. He asks Ahmed how long he has been in South Africa and what his current status is. “Waiting for status,” Ahmed says. “Applied and waiting, waiting for nine months, no answer.” James notices, once again, that there is a shagginess to his language, as Ahmed continues, “There is no one to help me, don’t know anyone who can help, don’t know any officer in Home Affairs to assist me, or to bribe.” As they have breakfast, James watches Ahmed clumsily handling his fork and knife, unable at first to determine even how to cut off a slice of his chicken, or how to put jam on his toast. “Where did you apply, Joburg or Pretoria?” “Joburg Home Affairs.” One of James’s former students occupies a middle-ranking position at the Home Affairs office in Joburg, and he can put in a word to help expedite matters for Ahmed. However, it is too soon to promise to do that. Not yet. There is a proper occasion and a proper place for this sort of intervention, which requires a cautious approach on his part. In addition, he won’t want to make everything appear so easy, as this may cheapen the favor that is on offer. He asks, “So what papers do you have now?” “I got a temporary permit to stay,” Ahmed says, tripping over the word “temporary.” James has met people from the Middle East for whom the letter “p” is an ordeal to pronounce. Even Yacine, who has been here for almost a decade, often stumbles on it, in addition to mixing his verbs and misplacing his prepositional and adjectival phrases. James tells himself that a language like English has room enough for everyone from anywhere, which is why it has lately become everybody’s second tongue. He says, “How long have you been here now?” “Two years and eight months.” “May I ask you a very personal question?” “Go ’head and ask.” “Have you taken a loan to open the store?” After a long silence, Ahmed says, “No.” “How did you get the money?” “My father, he sent me money from Mogadishu.” “What business is your dad in nowadays?” “He made plenty money in the early nineties.” Ahmed gets to his feet, saying, “Sorry, toilet,” and dashes off. He is gone a long time, and when he comes back James asks how he is, and Ahmed says, “I feel better, much better.” James settles the bill, and they return to the clinic to collect the results of the tests. Neither is surprised to hear that they confirm Ahmed’s self-diagnosis—food poisoning. They stop at a pharmacy and James pays for the prescription, then they drive to James’s house on the pretext that he needs to collect some documents from his study. After parking the car in the two-car garage, James, out of thoughtfulness, says to Ahmed, “Please wait in the car for a moment. I know from previous associations with other Somalis that you may want me to put the dogs in the back yard, so they won’t be a nuisance.” Ahmed says, “How many dogs do you have?” “Three purebred,” James says. Ahmed speaks as if in awe: “Three dogs?” “We’re going to see my family. There’s an extra twenty in it for you if we never get there.”Buy the print » Not that Ahmed is impressed by the fact that all three dogs are pure-blooded. For him, a dog is a dog; he is scared of them and won’t go near one. So he sits in the car and does not relax until James comes out to tell him that the house is now clear. He follows James in with the cautiousness of someone entering enemy territory. And when he hears a bang coming from the kitchen he stops in his tracks. He wants to know who is making the noise. “Dogs?” he inquires, ready to flee. “It is the house help,” James says. “House help?” “The maid in the kitchen, working.” And James calls to the maid, a large woman almost his size. The woman smiles and then curtsies and utters a few words of welcome. James asks for a glass of water so that Ahmed can take his medicine. The woman returns with a glass filled to the brim, waits and watches as the young Somali raises the glass to his lips. After that, Ahmed moves about the house freely, unafraid. He goes from one room to another, opening the doors of the bathroom and, next to it, the toilet. James waits for him to return from his inspection, and when Ahmed comes back into the kitchen he sees that his eyes are open wide with wonder. James says, “There is more upstairs.” Ahmed, obviously overwhelmed, goes up the stairs, James following, and passes through one bedroom after another. When he walks into the study and sees the number of books and the stacks of magazines, two desktop computers, and three laptops all in one room, he turns to James and asks, “How many people live here?” “Only me,” James replies. He points at the laptops, asks, “Why three?” “Would you like one of them?” “As gift for me?” “Yes, as a gift to you for our friendship.” “I am glad, yes, thank you.” James then explains that since the laptop contains some of his documents they will drop it off at a specialist’s, who will save the documents and then wipe the computer clean for Ahmed’s future use. “You read all these books?” Ahmed asks. James, modestly, says, “Most of them.” Then, after a pause, he asks Ahmed, “Do you like reading yourself—and what type of books do you like?” “My English bad—can’t read books, only magazines.” “I can teach you to read. Would you like that?” “Too old, maybe,” Ahmed says. James takes Ahmed’s hand, and Ahmed doesn’t pull it away and doesn’t resist when he holds on to it. “You are young and intelligent, and you will learn fast when I teach you. I am a good teacher; I’ve been a university professor for many years. It will make me happy to give you lessons here in this house.” And James leads him downstairs by the hand to the gym. Ahmed first gets on the bicycle and starts pedalling, then he steps onto the treadmill and, pressing the wrong buttons, almost falls off. James catches him in time and hugs him to himself, his heart beating at a faster rate. He is all memory, remembering the preteen, whom he never had. He thinks, This one is different. Here it will be consensual. Again, Ahmed doesn’t resist or push James away. Ahmed says, “We’ll see. Our future is long.” Noticing a pile of books in the gym, almost all of them about Somalia, Ahmed asks if James has read these, too. To which James replies, “I borrowed them from the library of the university where I taught for many years, and I intend to read them. I want to have a better understanding of your country’s history as I get to know you more. It is a fascinating country, where you come from.” Ahmed feels obligated to take a look at the books. He reads a few of the titles aloud, mispronouncing some of the words and massacring the names of the authors, except for the Somali ones. “Can we go? I need to open store,” Ahmed says finally. “Of course.” In the car, Ahmed says, “I love everything in your house.” “Thank you.” “One day I would like house like this.” “Here or in Somalia?” Ahmed says, “One big house like this here, another in Somalia. My father lives in house bigger than this, with more rooms, and near the ocean, two hundred metres from Lido, in Mogadishu.” “I cannot afford a house on the seafront.” “One day I’ll take you to Mogadishu, if you want.” “I would love that. But is it safe?” “My father will make sure you are safe.” James stops in front of the store to drop him off. Curious about Ahmed’s father and eager to know more, James seeks out a prominent Somali social-science professor who’s visiting the University of Pretoria on a two-year stint. Rashid and James meet at the university’s main cafeteria. James plays up to Rashid, praising his scholarly acumen and describing his pieces as the most enlightening he has read on the phenomenon known as African warlordism. James adds, “No one writes about this as well as you do.” Rashid bubbles over with excitement and speaks at length about Somali warlordism as a scourge for which there is no cure, since it feeds on the dysfunctional nature of factionalism. James is thinking that he likes his liquors straight, but he doesn’t like “isms” of any sort, because “isms” disempower you, when suddenly a familiar name—Mooryaan—catches his attention. “ ‘Mooryaan’ means ‘pillager,’ you know, in Somali,” Rashid says. “The man is a bloodthirsty criminal, a plunderer of the nation’s wealth, accused of organizing the looting of the Central Bank, of dismantling working factories and selling the metal as scrap in the Arabian Gulf.” Rashid has a way of raising his voice a few decibels higher when he gets emotional, and of spraying anyone sitting close by with spittle. James wipes away the spit and then asks, “So, his wealth comes from these ill-gotten gains?” “Ali-Mooryaan is one of the wealthiest men in Somalia,” Rashid replies. “He ‘owns’ many villas on Mogadishu’s seafront and has bought properties in Nairobi and in the Emirates. He has funded piracy, and he has made money out of exporting hard drugs via a small airstrip fifty kilometres outside Mogadishu.” “In other words, he is your typical warlord.” “He is one of the most wicked warlords.” James derives some pleasure from thinking that Ahmed is unlikely to return to Somalia for quite some time, given the precariousness of the politics there. And even though his father is powerful, Ahmed seems to lack that kind of ruthlessness. Perhaps he will be happy to stay out of his father’s sphere of influence once James assures him of a firm foothold in South Africa from which he can further his own career. And, to this end, James decides to “invest” more in the young man in a way that will help him to gain his full trust and his eventual affection. In an effort to achieve his aim and also to avoid upsetting the manager of the restaurant and the kitchen staff, he starts delivering Ahmed’s lunch to him at the store and then picking him up in the car for an evening meal at his house, dropping him back at the store after coaching him in conversational English. That way, they meet at least once daily. In the store, if there are no customers around they chat longer; and, if there are, James hands over the package of food, and at times even adds a card with a brief message. Nor is food the only gift that James gives. For he has bought Ahmed three pairs of trousers, three shirts, several pairs of underwear, and a pair of comfortable shoes. The way it goes is that James presents something as a gift, Ahmed, pretending, says, “I can’t accept this,” or “It is too much,” or “You are spoiling me, my friend,” and then finally he invariably says, “Thank you. You are most kind”—evidence that he appreciates what James is doing for him. When, one evening after dinner, Ahmed complains of a toothache, James plays the dentist, making him open his mouth and holding down his tongue with a spoon. “Enough, I’ll take you to my dentist first thing,” he says, and sets up an emergency appointment very early the following morning. And he won’t hear of Ahmed’s protestations, saying, “You sleep in the downstairs room, because we need to get there by half past seven at the latest.” He lends Ahmed a pair of pajamas, his late wife’s. Ahmed, afraid that the dogs may find their way into the house and, who knows, attack him, locks the door from the inside. In truth, it hasn’t escaped James’s notice that Ahmed is inclined to lock the bathroom door. Perhaps the fellow is just wary by nature. Anyway, at six in the morning James knocks on Ahmed’s door to wake him. Ahmed has a shower, and after breakfast they go to the dentist together. The dentist draws up a schedule after learning that he is the first dentist Ahmed has ever consulted, telling him that he must come back several times for the work on his teeth to be done. Afterward, alone with James—Ahmed is now with the oral hygienist, having his teeth spruced up—the dentist asks, “Where did you find him?” “He has a store near the restaurant.” The dentist says, “He strikes me as hand-carved, a young man made to order.” “He is, isn’t he?” “What is going on?” the dentist asks. “Nothing yet.” “And where does he stay?” “I won’t tell you.” “You know he is not my type.” “As if I know what your type is.” “Anyhow, be careful. That is my advice.” James has been very cautious, the two hardly coming into bodily contact, except one day when James is in the gym and Ahmed, tired of watching TV, joins him. James proposes that he help stretch Ahmed’s body and he sits on him, as personal trainers do. Then he touches him here and there, squeezing, massaging, and pressing his thighs, his groin—until he feels Ahmed’s rising mound of manhood. James apologizes insincerely, even though he doesn’t wish to stop, worried that continuing might upset Ahmed to the point where he will flee the nest that he has made his home. However, he makes no further move and nothing happens between them for another year and a half. And there comes a point where James suspects that the changes in Ahmed that are visible to the eye could match some changes that can’t be seen. The store opens later and later in the morning and closes earlier. Ahmed’s Somali friends see him infrequently and several come looking for him, wondering if he is O.K. And they notice the changes, not only because Ahmed is wearing freshly pressed trousers and sporting Ray-Bans or using the latest type of iPhone but also because he doesn’t seem to have time to yammer with them. He is always in a hurry, mysteriously going somewhere, even though he won’t explain where. The Somalis aren’t the only people who have noticed. One day, James eavesdrops on a conversation between Yacine and the Turkish chef—in which Yacine dismisses the Somali as a “toy boy,” for the old man. James wishes that this were the case. He pretends not to have heard anything and collects the dinner for that night. It is possible that others with an eye for more nefarious activities have observed Ahmed’s frequent absences from the store, for it is broken into and everything of value taken, and the door left open until sunrise, when some of the passersby are said to have helped themselves to whatever they could lay their hands on. With nowhere else to go, no store to mind, and nothing to do by way of a vocation, Ahmed moves full time into James’s house. James, for his part, reduces his visits to the restaurant to a minimum and works from home, the house help cooking most of his and Ahmed’s daytime meals, and the two of them either eating leftovers at night or rustling up light snacks. Ahmed spends more and more time in the family room watching TV. James joins him for the news and, sitting very close, they hold hands and talk. One early morning, James sneaks into Ahmed’s room and gets into bed and snuggles up to him. For a while, Ahmed pretends to be asleep and doesn’t move at all. But when James, fully naked, nestles closer, his hand reaching out and making obvious what his intentions are, Ahmed says, “Please, not now,” in the same tone of voice a woman uses when she says that she has her monthly. And the two of them sleep nude together, waiting for the appropriate day when they will consummate their union.

It had been an ordinary day, to a point. I had a headache that wouldn’t let up, and there was a party I’d promised I’d go to—I’d said see you soon to the people at work. But after I unlocked my door and kicked off my shoes all I could think about was jumping into bed. Once I allowed myself to think that this was a reasonable idea, I felt released from the grip of the party; I realized that if I slept right through nobody would really care. I threw down my bag in the hall. A stale smell engulfed me, as if from a storage room that hadn’t been opened for a long time, but I was too dead to investigate. I groped for the light switch but instead felt a warm furry thing on my hand. Next thing I knew, I was lying on my back in a bed. The bed was hard, and there was a thin blue blanket over me. Looking up, I saw light coming through an old-fashioned shade that had been pulled down over a window. There was nothing like this in my apartment. Slightly yellowed, it had a cord hanging from it which had been crocheted around a plastic pull ring. There was a familiar water stain on the shade, a lion’s head coming out of a rose, and I sat up in bed with a gasp. Across the room, on the opposite wall, two pink-framed pictures were precisely where I remembered them. In one was a fluffy, cartoonish-looking kitten wearing a tuxedo with a white carnation on the lapel, and a tall top hat that reflected light in the pattern of a hazard symbol. The other showed a kitten on skis, wearing blue earmuffs and sitting at the bottom of a snowy slope. As a child, I used to stare at these pink-framed kittens from my bed and think of them as significant features of my universe. There were other familiar items—on the bureau was a red enamelled poodle pin I’d baked in a kiln for my mother, even though she hated poodles. Beside it was a key-chain lanyard I’d made for my father, with yellow and brown braided plastic twine. “Mama?” I called, for it seemed perfectly natural to say that, even though of course she was no longer living, and I had recently forced myself to stop talking to her when I was alone. Instead, a large beast swept in. This explained the furry touch on my hand. The beast stood on two legs and was about the same size as my mother, but it was covered in a mat of brindled fur that was as thick as the coat on a sheepdog and obscured the contours of its body. The beast sneezed. Dust flew in the small sliver of light that came in at the edge of the blind. I said, “O.K. if I open the window?” The beast crossed the room and pulled the little hoop—once, twice, until the blind caught and rolled up. I realized that it had been a long while since I’d seen blinds like this. They had fallen out of favor for some reason, though they were really very functional. With a shock, I saw the trees that had been outside my bedroom when I was a kid—the mulberry, the elm, and the peach tree, all in scale to my youth, stopped in time. “How did we get here?” I asked, noticing how thin my voice sounded. But the beast was gone. I jumped up and started looking around. A few of my games and toys sat in the closet, right where they belonged. I had often thought of our old house, and thought I could remember it perfectly, but there were all sorts of things I had forgotten. The map of the United States in the hallway, for instance. My parents had mounted it on cardboard, and made a frame for it out of binding tape. Beside it was the hall closet. Yes, there was the old hospital-green rolling vacuum cleaner, nestled between my mother’s wool coats, which smelled of mothballs. The bathroom was as it had been before we fixed it up. I liked it better this way. Original wallpaper, which I remembered later helping my mother strip with a steamer and a scraper, a good example of false progress. I peeked around the corner into the living room, wondering if the illusion was complete. It was, in every detail. The brown sofa, the basket full of magazines, the bookshelves, the ceramic owls. I crossed the braided rug, followed the hall on the other side, and went into my parents’ bedroom; there was the beast, lying on its side, as my mother used to in the afternoons. I knew exactly what to do, and I wasn’t afraid. I came around the bed and sat next to the beast, situating myself near its upended hip. The beast stirred, and peered up at me. It reached out and put its large paw on my arm. Exactly the way my mother used to. I lay down beside it, and the beast hugged me to its breast. We snoozed like this a long while, in great contentment; when I woke, the beast was gone. My back was cold, and a cool draft blew in from the window, making the curtain billow lazily. Somewhere in the distance I could hear a chain saw and the low hum of rush-hour traffic. In the kitchen, the beast was pushing onions around in a pan. It glanced up, not minding me at all. I could hear a rustling sound just around the corner, where our kitchen table used to be, like the sound of my sister doing her homework or cutting pictures out of magazines. There was a small beast doing exactly that, holding a pair of red plastic scissors, snipping out pictures of animals. She was arranging the cutouts on the table: a cow, a giraffe, two dogs, and a bear. I sat in my good old chair. The small beast was kicking the center pole of the round table, pinging it with her bullet-like toes, just as my sister used to. It was annoying, but I didn’t feel comfortable kicking the little beast or complaining. Instead, I picked up a magazine from the pile and began to leaf through it. It was Life, April 13, 1953. Before I was born, but my parents were alive. I flipped through it: there was an ad for the G.E. Range that thinks, a letter to the editor about Igor Stravinsky—“Stravinsky’s statement that music is incapable of expressing emotion is a reflection of the sorry state modern composers have entered.” There was a strongly worded editorial about Korea and ending the bloodshed; I knew barely anything about that war. A photo of demonstrators being clubbed in Brazil, a photo of massacred and “Disarmed Kikuyus” in Kenya, ads for a spinet piano and a full page for Hunt’s ketchup and another for Hertz—because “there are so many times a woman needs a car.” Strangely, I knew much more about the piano and the ketchup than about the events in Brazil and Kenya. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever really thought about 1953 in any specific way—a whole year of people’s lives, a whole year of history, a whole year that all years since had built on. I didn’t want the little beast to cut this magazine up, so I hid it under the table, on my lap. By the old clock on the stove, I could see that it was precisely six when a large, father-shaped beast came through the back door, as my father used to do. He greeted us all with hugs—me as well, as if I were no different to him than the others—and took a large tumbler etched with Romans in togas and filled it with ice and gin and just a dash of vermouth. I knew exactly what was next. He removed a jar of dry-roasted peanuts from the cupboard and poured some into a bowl and shook it until the peanuts levelled out. And then he sat with us at the table, tossing a few into his mouth while enjoying his Martini. Shortly, dinner was served: peas, small steaks covered with onions, and baked potatoes, on the green Melmac plates we used to have. It was all too remarkable for me to feel hungry, but I tried to eat, wanting to fit in. I had wished many times to re-inhabit my childhood home. For years, I dreamed about the house and its every corner. Many of the dreams involved getting the house back, either magically or simply by having it come on the market. In some dreams, the house was different and yet I recognized it as mine. In others, the house was backed by vast tracts of land that descended into canyons and valleys, even though it was nothing like that where we lived. We had not been especially happy there, nor was it an especially beautiful house or neighborhood. I could never really understand why it haunted me. Now I saw that beyond our back fence were acres and acres of grass and alfalfa, with solid granite outcroppings here and there. There were footholds in the rocks where local tribes used to climb. There were also mortar holes they had used for grinding pemmican, and narrow pits where they sharpened arrows. No one had graffitied the rocks or left them covered with bottles and cans, which surprised me. It would have meant so much to me to wander back there when we lived in the house. How could we not have known? My mother would have loved it, and it might have saved her mental health. She could have roamed during the day while we were at school, looking for arrowheads, taking notes in her field journal, making sketches. We once found a trading bead in our small back yard. It was cornflower blue, caked with mud. My mother rinsed it in the sink, just about the most excited I’d ever seen her. I started digging holes in the back yard after that, hoping to find more relics and antiquities to please her. I wondered what it would be like to live along the trail on which Napoleon marched to Moscow. Or along the path that Hannibal and the elephants took across the Alps. The soil where we lived was very hard and difficult to dig in. I kept digging, though. I liked having an ongoing project. Every week, I got a little deeper, hoping to find something. This interlude, or whatever it was, carried on. Days went by in what felt like the usual fashion. I could barely remember my recent life—there had been a lot of rushing around in uncomfortable shoes and meeting with people and always having to play some game from which I was supposed to receive some gain. I didn’t miss it at all. My surroundings in the past several years had become unimportant to me, and whenever I transferred jobs I moved from one serviceable apartment to the next, not the least attached to any of them. Now here I was, walking my old route to school and revisiting the houses of childhood friends, who had been supplanted by beasts of appropriate shapes and sizes. I was relishing every iconic detail. Each reunion thrilled me in a way that is almost impossible to describe, and sometimes I found myself smiling so hard that tears came to my eyes. And so I settled in, enjoying the chance to investigate all the old drawers and cabinets in my house, to examine the simple artifacts of that life with wonder, and to accept the genuine warmth of the beasts and their embrace of me, which was something I’d always felt was fragile in my own family. The motherly beast who cuddled me that first day remained gentle and warm. The childish beast played happily, without much complication. I did not have to struggle to express myself, and felt included and appreciated, and somehow that was more than enough. I started to feel that words had been my undoing, that in trying to explain anything I’d ever thought or felt I’d only driven a wedge between me and other people. Sometimes, after I’d spent a long afternoon pulling books off the shelves, looking at the inscriptions, or actually reading the books to gain greater insight into my parents’ interests, I’d find myself feeling slightly unmoored, and before I knew it the beasts would come and surround me in a circle, hugging me. There was such pleasure in their warm soft bodies and in the way they responded to my unspoken moods. They fed me old favorites and new things, too, like flavorful bowls of mush, rich and delicious, as if filled with butter and nutmeats. An old beast visited regularly who enjoyed brushing my hair, something that I knew other girls’ mothers did. Another prepared baths, and scrubbed my back and washed my hair patiently when I sat in the warm fragrant water, as if it were some kind of honor to take care of me. The beasts didn’t wear clothing, yet someone always washed and ironed the clothes that were in the closet—yes, clothes I’d had as a child that somehow still fit me. The weather coöperated with all this kindness, every day sunny and bright and warm. I’d sit in the yard and pick a peach or an orange or a fig off trees that I knew had long ago died of disease and been chopped down. Looking around my room one day, I saw a book on my shelf that reminded me of a long-forgotten incident. There was a phrase in this book that had caused me some trouble, and, sure enough, thumbing through the worn pages I found it quickly. The book was about a big lucky family of English children and their wonderful summer adventures of complete freedom on a sailboat. Here it was, Nancy speaking: “And then we’ve got to be all proper in party dresses ready to soothe the savage breast when the Great Aunt comes gorgoning in.” I laughed out loud. This phrase had made me shriek during free-reading at school. Surely it was a typo, surely it was supposed to say “savage beast.” “The curvature of the screen tricks the brain into perceiving that you’re not overpaying.”Buy the print » My fifth-grade teacher was an old woman with legs so swollen she could barely stand long enough to write things on the chalkboard, and when I showed her why I was so worked up she sent me to the principal. It was not the first time that she’d sent me, and Mr. Leonard knew me by then. “What is it this time?” he asked. He was a giant, probably six feet six, with close-cropped curly hair and teeth like piano keys. “I just wanted to know if it’s valid to say ‘soothe the savage breast’ instead of ‘soothe the savage beast.’ ” “Is this in dispute?” the principal asked. I showed him the passage. “I believe Mrs. Haymond is embarrassed by the word ‘breast.’ Not to mention ‘bosom,’ ” he said, and then it was I who blushed. A few weeks before, I’d been sent to Mr. Leonard for saying that word, a word that struck me as nasty. “Breast” was a firm and lean term, but “bosom” sounded dangling and clammy. “It’s true I said that to cause trouble, but I didn’t say this to cause trouble.” “I also understand that you’ve continued to pronounce ‘ed’ at the end of all verbs?” It was an annoying compulsion, that I felt I had to say “walk-ed” instead of “walkt.” “Why does it matter to her so much?” “She thinks you’re trying to annoy her on purpose. Would you be opposed to doing it a little less, just to keep the peace?” “It’s just that . . .” Should I tell him that if I didn’t do it the core of the world would collapse? That it was an outlet, that I needed to be absorbed in small, manageable projects like that? But he was cutting me some slack, and I agreed to stifle myself. I had seldom thought about Mrs. Haymond’s hatred for me in the years since, or of the strange pleasure I got from provoking her. She was a lonely old woman with fat legs who was probably miserable. She had to be dead by now, buried and forgotten. And she wasn’t the only person I’d been mean to back then. I used to enjoy frightening my sister, chasing her around with the roaring open hose of the vacuum cleaner, letting it clamp onto her like a viper, leaving round marks on her skin while she screamed. But we’re close now, aren’t we? I believe we are; I am sure we are. We talk all the time on the phone. And then one day, when my guard was down and I simply believed I deserved all this warmth and comfort, the beasts began to hurry around with great agitation, and it was plain that something had changed and we would have to clear out. To tell the truth, I’d stopped questioning the nature of this reality. I didn’t know what the world was like outside the neighborhood—if the whole world was as it had been, or if this was just a bubble within the world as it was now. Would we stay in the bubble, or have to go back? We left all at once, at night. I ran to keep up, guided by the jagged breathing of the beasts around me. We rushed down a long alley to the wash, pushed through the wire and down to a concrete platform by the waterway. A small boat waited for us there, a beast at the helm. We climbed in as if we were being chased, though looking over my shoulder I couldn’t see or hear anything. The beasts formed a circle and allowed me to sink in between them, cushioned by their luxurious fur. The captain started the motor, and we set off down the culvert under a sky of silvery stars. I wondered what the danger was. I trusted them completely. We passed down the channel a good distance before the boat slowed. Ahead, a lantern was swinging in the dark, signalling to us. As we pulled closer, I saw that it was held by a large bear wearing a ranger’s outfit. “Smokey Bear’s a py-ro-ma-ni-ac,” I sang out without thinking, and all the beasts turned on me. They grabbed me by the shoulders and pushed me down, burying me in the midst of them, out of sight. I was smothered by fur and ashamed. The boat rocked as if we were taking on a passenger or some freight, and then the engine kicked in again, and the boat picked up speed, and, after a few more minutes, breathing shallowly, I was released. “I didn’t mean anything bad,” I said. The beasts were waving their arms and I could tell by their eyes that it had been very important not to offend the Bear. They seemed angry with me, as if I were more of a loose cannon than they’d realized. They surrounded me as if demanding an answer. “I used to sing it when I was a kid,” I tried to explain. “To bother my sister. She was obsessed with him.” It was the first time that the beasts had been angry with me, and I felt discouraged and insecure. I lacked, it had been said, pragmatic language skills. I had been tested at school. It meant that, even though I seemed smart, I didn’t know how to talk to people in day-to-day life. I wondered if that was true. Didn’t I talk to people a lot? Maybe I wasn’t really talking; maybe I was only listening. It was true that whenever I wanted to say something I had all these thoughts and feelings, but it was sometimes hard to find words for them. The beasts docked the boat. I had no idea what time it was, but I was tired. They climbed out and I followed. We ran single file up a staircase covered with litter, and when we reached the top we had to climb over a chain-link fence. Though it was dark, I could see that we were near a freeway overpass. There were a number of trucks parked in the darkness. Some of them had their refrigerator units on, humming steadily. The backs of the trucks opened up. Other beasts appeared, and piled in. The heavy smell of diesel panicked them, and I grabbed onto one of my beasts for fear I’d get separated. All at once I was being boosted into a truck by someone with skin and hands. The back of the truck rolled down with a crash, and I settled on the floor. The truck rumbled on through the night. I found a comfortable place for my head, on the thigh of a beast, and felt relieved that I had been forgiven my earlier mistake. When I woke up, the beasts were stirring and the truck was slowing, and then it stopped. Before long, the back rolled up. Daylight streamed in, and what I saw was nowhere I’d ever been before. It was a desert landscape, flat, dusty, yellow, dry. The air was hot, and fine particles of sand blew in, and a man was helping the beasts climb down. When it was my turn, he nodded but didn’t appear to care that I wasn’t a beast. He was maybe in his mid-twenties, with golden hair pulled into a ponytail, and he wore a Levi’s jacket and a leather belt and had long sideburns and a scar above one of his eyes, and he was barefoot, and looked a lot like a boy who had mattered to me in high school. He took out a box cutter and opened a container full of water bottles that had been in the truck. He passed them out to everyone standing there. The others had fanned out to relieve themselves in the dust. Furry backs faced us in all directions. I counted—I’d been sharing the back of the truck with thirty-three beasts of all ages. “Where are we?” I asked, but the man just opened another box. He pulled out lunch sacks and distributed them. In mine was a sandwich wrapped in cellophane, a big oatmeal cookie in a wax-paper sleeve, a bag of corn chips, and a perfect-looking peach. Beasts bit at their food and tore it apart, and little pieces flew. Ants attacked the crumbs on the ground around us. I stepped away from the truck to look at the condition of the road, but there was no road. I couldn’t see one anywhere around the truck, and so I walked in larger and larger circles. Could we have driven all this way without a road? The sand was blowing harder now. I saw tufts of hair coming off the beasts, flying away in the wind. The beasts were scratching themselves as if the sand really irritated them. Some of us huddled in circles. “Why did he bring us out here?” I asked, but that didn’t seem to be the main question on everybody’s mind. It was more like: What now? Some of the beasts began digging. Others wandered away, toward the distant, uninterrupted horizon. My beasts dug, but it seemed futile. The sand kept blowing back into the holes, filling them up again. I wanted to help, but I had no idea how to help or even what I should hope for. The beasts had been scratching themselves so violently that in places they had lost almost all their fur and the skin underneath was bleeding. As they lost fur from their faces, they began to look more human. Their facial structure was almost the same as mine, or maybe just like mine. They had cheekbones and chins and lips and noses. With the fur they all looked mostly the same, but without fur they looked very different from one another. I realized that without the fur one of the beasts looked almost exactly like our old next-door neighbor, Bill McGee, an insurance salesman, a nice man with a nice wife named Marion. They had seven cats, and whenever they went on vacation we’d offer to feed and play with the cats. They were the only neighbors my mother ever made friends with. One day, they announced that they were moving far away, and from that day forward my mother felt that her world was crumbling. Some essential component of her well-being never recovered. “Mr. McGee?” I found myself saying to the scraggly beast. But the beast merely glanced at me and continued to dig in the sand. More fur flew away in the wind, and the beasts began to shiver. I was growing despondent, as the beasts lost their fur and continued to dig. Everything felt futile, like madness. I was hungry and thirsty again, and I came around the truck to find the driver, who was sitting in the cab, smoking a cigarette, staring out at the vast nothingness. I waved up at him. “Can you understand me?” “Sometimes,” he said. “Is there some reason we had to stop here?” He climbed out of the cab, his shirt blowing open. He handed me a plastic cup and filled it with hot black coffee from a thermos, the last of it. Then we walked around and sat on the truck’s lift gate. I didn’t ask any questions; I just drank my coffee. I had a hunch that we’d run out of fuel, and it was embarrassing him. He lifted one of his bare feet to pull a thorn out of his heel. I reached over and touched his stomach, and my hand slipped down under his belt. He lay back on the wooden floor of the truck, which was scarred by many years of yielding to the rough wood of pallets and the scrape of pallet jacks and forklifts. I didn’t want to kiss him, but his lips parted; the remains of his breakfast were at the corners of his mouth and a smear of peach flesh was in the stubble on his chin. I simply moved my hand in the way that was necessary, rubbing my knuckles on the inside of his zipper. His ponytail lay off to the side, and I found myself repelled by the smell of his flesh, so used to the soft fur of the beasts had I become. An exhausted groan erupted from his throat, and I managed to withdraw my hand, dry. He was not the boy who had mattered to me, that much was for sure. Some of the beasts were losing their claws and ripping their skin as they dug into the ground. Their toes were getting bloody, but it didn’t stop them. The little fur they had left was clotted with blood, and the sand was sticking to it, and they were wiping their paws on their sides in bold, bloody, sandy streaks and continuing on. The reddish-brown streaks on their fur and their foreheads began to resemble war paint. Frantically, they scratched on, occasionally finding a beetle in the cooler parts of the soil, or a ground rat’s tunnel, or a snake hole with bones in it. Now the beasts were slowing down. One was up to its neck in a pit, still flinging out clumps of roots and sand in sporadic bursts. Retreating figures weaved uncertainly, weak and purposeless, broken. Several of the beasts were dead. Flies attacked them, lighting on the blood on their skin and remaining patches of fur. I wandered across the plain where all this purposeless digging and clinging to life was happening, until I came upon the beast I’d known in the way I’d known my mother. She was lying on her side, panting with great effort, and, like the other beasts, she had lost much of her lovely fur. There was a pattern of freckles on her arm, just as there had been on my mother’s arm, a constellation of freckles that I had known better than the night sky. I touched the beast’s skin there, and it flinched, but then relaxed. I held its hand. I’d missed my mother’s death—I’d been at work, I hadn’t come fast enough. Now, for the first time, I could clearly see the beast’s teeth. When my mother died and was sent to be cremated I had cried, ridiculously, about her teeth, which I had always loved, unable to conceive of a world where I could no longer see them. I sat with the beast until sometime in the middle of the night, when the sky was very black and the stars were bright. I held its hand all through the panting, rumbling breaths that led to the last one, like an old engine going still. I was hungry. It was cold. I had a conscience. I had a sister I never spoke to. Dear history, dear life. Hadn’t I been glad enough?

After his mother died, Thomas started thinking about his father. All too frequently, while she was dying, there had been talk of her going to meet him in Paradise, returning to the arms of her husband of thirty-two years, who had died thirty-two years before she did. This would be bliss. Thomas did not believe in such things, of course, though it was hard not to try to imagine them, if only to savor the impossibility of the idea: the two insubstantial souls greeting each other in the ether, the airy embrace. She had been ninety at death, he sixty. There would be some adjustment for that, presumably, in Heaven. The madness of it confirmed one’s skepticism. But even assuming that she had gone to meet him, who was he? Who was he now? Who was he then? Who was my father? Thomas thought. And why was he asking himself these questions now? That wasn’t clear. They weren’t exactly urgent. On the other hand, they weren’t going away. He didn’t feel like doing research, putting his father’s name into Google or delving into archives. He could have looked at his father’s old sermon notes. Thomas’s sister had taken some papers when their mother’s house was sold, after the funeral. The notes would have told him something, reminded him of his father’s handwriting, of the way the man thought. But he didn’t want to do that. The thought of his father’s sermons aroused unpleasant emotions. It was difficult to put his finger on the reason. A sense of embarrassment and irritation. What he wanted, rather, was to assemble a picture of his father as he, Thomas, remembered him. Who was he for me? A son should be able to say what his father was for him. What part of my personality do I owe him? How does this man still simmer in my life? If he does. Occasionally, Thomas would tell himself that he regretted not having asked his mother more about his father while she was alive. That would surely have been the moment to undertake this reappraisal. Now all his mother’s memories of his father had died with her. He’d never be able to access them. Yet he didn’t actually regret not asking her. The truth was that for all this chatter about her going to meet him in the beyond, for all her occasional tears when Father was mentioned, Thomas’s mother had spoken very little of his father. Very little. Perhaps the only time his name could reliably be expected to come up was when Thomas and his mother argued over something, usually something of a religious or political nature. Thomas could be provocative, stubborn, and his mother never wanted to lose an argument about things that mattered. Then, between exasperation and amusement, she would say, “You’re just like your father, Thomas. He loved to play devil’s advocate, too!” How was this possible? His father had been a clergyman. Thomas couldn’t remember the man expressing a single idea that went against orthodox Christianity. How could Mother remember him playing devil’s advocate? Presumably, in their own private relationship, Father had liked to get her riled, flustered, indignant. And this had been partly, though perhaps not altogether, in fun. “He loved to split hairs, just like you,” Thomas’s mother said, shaking her gray head. She did not say which hairs Father had split, and Thomas had not asked her to expand. Why hadn’t Thomas questioned her reticence during her lifetime? It was not that he suspected that there was some secret being hidden from him. It was more as though she’d wanted to keep the man to herself. Perhaps she had been afraid that speaking of Father to Thomas would diminish him. Because Father was so devout and Thomas such a doubter. Speaking about him might have given her son a chance to make some disparaging remark, or simply to show once again that he didn’t believe. To rock the boat. That was a favorite expression of Father’s: Don’t rock the boat! In any event, she had kept whatever there was between them in her heart, to the end. In her bedroom, there was a photo of Thomas’s father as a young man, and on the glass frame below his face she had placed a small square of white paper with a few lines of religious poetry: Death hides— But it cannot divide. Thou art but on Christ’s Other side. Thou with Christ And Christ with me And so together Still are we. Thomas respected this carefully preserved bereavement. He didn’t investigate. He knew that when the cancer had gone to his father’s brain he had accused his mother of all kinds of unpleasant things and that this had upset her greatly. Never for one moment did Thomas imagine that there was any truth in those accusations. It was just that the cancer had gone to Dad’s head. And who does one accuse, when accusing, if not one’s wife of thirty years? Thomas knew plenty about that. It even occurred to him that he was thinking about his father now because, in separating from his own wife, he had undone, as it were, the last thing that his father had done as a clergyman, when he’d married them, Thomas and his wife, holding their ringed hands one above the other and declaring, “Those whom God hath joined together, let no man put asunder.” Recently, in preparation for the divorce, Thomas had had to dig out the marriage certificate with Father’s signature on it. It seemed odd to think that his father’s hand had pressed on that very paper. Thirty-two years ago. His handwriting was scratched and sharp, but not without a certain angular elegance. Thomas examined the certificate for a few minutes, looking at his own signature, his wife’s, his father’s, then put it in an envelope with the other papers, ready for his divorce. Whore. That was it. Just once his mother had talked about it. They had been speaking about her cancer, he remembered. She was lucky, she said, because hers hadn’t gone to her head. Like poor Dad’s. Then she burst into tears and told Thomas that, in his madness before he died, Father had said all kinds of awful things; he had called her a whore. Shocked, Thomas immediately reassured his mother that it had been the disease speaking. She knew that. In his right mind Dad would never have said such a thing. Later, Thomas realized that she had told him this in order to receive his reassurance before dying herself. Once reassured, she didn’t tell him anything else. Edward Sanders was born in Liverpool, on the longest day of the year, in 1920. He’d had two sisters, one definitely younger. Perhaps both had been younger. Thomas could have asked his own brother or sister about this—they were older than him, they might know—but he didn’t want his brother and sister to know that he was thinking about his father. Why not? He didn’t want to pool their collective memories. He didn’t want to have to adjust his views in the light of their knowledge. Vaguely he was aware that Mother had spoken of Father’s being fond of Doris, the youngest sister. But, so far as he could recall, Father had never spoken of her. He had never spoken of his mother, either. All Thomas remembered, from perhaps two visits when he was very small, was a tiny old woman with white wispy hair and a hooked nose. Was his father deliberately enigmatic? Edward Sanders had talked once of his father, Thomas’s grandfather. They were on holiday in South Devon, and Father had wanted to visit Plymouth Sound, because his father’s ship had been mothballed there during the Great Depression. Thomas’s grandfather had been a ship’s captain, and Father had spent an unemployed summer with him on that ship, waiting for world commerce to start moving again. It must have been a happy time for him, because he got quite excited as they walked along the shore, pointing out where the ship had been, the landing stage they’d rowed to when they went ashore. Thomas had the impression that his father had wanted to become a seaman, too, but had been held back by his poor eyesight. His eyesight was so poor that neither the Army nor the Navy had accepted him. He couldn’t even get a driver’s license. So while his own hero father had fought submarines in the Atlantic, he’d worked in Cammell Laird shipyard, doing technical drawings for marine engines. One of the happiest stories Father liked to tell was about how he was admired for his ability to hit rats with a paperweight in the shipyard workshops. It was strange to think that he couldn’t see well enough to join the Navy or drive a car but was perfectly capable of drawing engines and hitting rats with paperweights. Father had never spoken of his reasons for becoming a clergyman. But Thomas did know that his father and mother had initially planned to be missionaries. They had met at missionary training college. They had wanted an adventurous life. It was 1948; they’d just lived through a war, but only on the edge of the action. She had been bombed in London, he in Liverpool. Her father had forbidden her to join the Wrens. His father had been disappointed that his son couldn’t enlist. Now they would fight the good fight another way. Thomas’s parents’ marriage, he realized now, was based on a religious mission. They were partners in a task: to make the world a better place by converting people to the faith. That was the logic of their being together. If either of them lost this faith, their marriage would be lost with it. Wouldn’t it? Their life was a life in the Church, for the Church, though, for reasons that were never explained, they hadn’t in the end become missionaries. Perhaps having produced children made them less eligible. The Church didn’t want to be responsible for little white children in Uganda or Indonesia. Maybe we children blocked Father’s career, Thomas thought. We frustrated his ambitions. First the eyesight problem, then his children. He remembered the man’s impatience. His father had no time for chatter. Sometimes he barely took time to eat. He was impatient with Mother, too, impatient to be doing. But doing what? Winning souls for Christ. How strange. And how disappointing for him, then, to have failed first and foremost with two of the three souls under his nose, Thomas and his older brother. He took our salvation for granted, Thomas thought. Once he had decided to make the effort, it didn’t take Thomas long to gather these thoughts and type them on his computer. If only because there were so few. Thomas was living in a small flat now, away from his wife, whom he had left some time ago. Away from his children, who were grown up now. They no longer needed him for protection. Only for financial support. Yet he did not feel as though he had really got away. It was as if he had left home to climb a mountain and was now stuck on top of it, bivouacked above the tree line, free, but freezing, with no way forward. Thomas was perplexed. His wife was down in the warm pastures waiting for him. So it seemed. But he wouldn’t go back. “Permission to treat the witness like gum stuck to the bottom of my heel?”Buy the print » There were memories of infancy and memories of adolescence. There were two or three incidents that seemed important. Watershed moments. During Thomas’s early childhood, his father had seemed busy and happy. He preached and led meetings. First in Manchester, then in Blackpool. He was charismatic and embattled. He liked a fight. His voice was vibrant. He made jokes. He was a leader. People came to him for advice. At breakfast and lunch and dinner he said grace. In the evening, before bed, he said prayers. They were fervent, earnest prayers, the prayers of someone going to Heaven, or to Hell. He wasn’t interested in empty, formal religion. He liked his lamb and his roast beef, his plum pie and his custard. But he was always impatient to be up and doing again. Thomas distinctly remembered his father thrusting his chair back and wiping gravy from his mouth with a white napkin. People said “serviette” then. His father had had a rather slack mouth, poor teeth, but he was always clean-shaven. He was always ready to be meeting people. To be saving their souls. Thomas could actually see the gravy stain on the crumpled napkin as his father hurried off. But he couldn’t see his father’s face. Thomas tried and tried, but he couldn’t quite see it. In the small apartment he lived in now, he kept no photos of the past. He had no family heirlooms. What had Father looked like? A thin handsome nose, definitely; sandy hair, but receding; gray-green eyes, very thick spectacles. Father was endlessly cleaning his spectacles, usually with a huge white handkerchief. Thomas could see the vigorous action of the hands rubbing the lenses with the cloth. But he couldn’t put eyes and nose together. He couldn’t remember looking into those eyes, or them looking into his. The handkerchief was in the way. Father’s body was easier. Thomas remembered an aura of vulnerability, at once wiry and hunched, tense. But not intimidated. He didn’t keep fit, but rode a bike to visit parishioners. At the church, they hated him, because he had banned the annual crowning of the May Queen. It was paganism, he said; it had nothing to do with Our Lord Jesus Christ and his message of joy and salvation. He hadn’t become a clergyman to perpetuate pagan rituals and crown pretty girls. Once, Father took Thomas to a holiday camp with some boys from a reform school. That was frightening. They were wild. They jumped off swings in motion to see who could leap the farthest. They yelled swearwords and made rude gestures. Some of them had been sent to the school for robbery or violence. Father didn’t seem to have any trouble talking to these boys or saving their souls. Perhaps he felt that it was missionary work. He felt fulfilled. If Thomas had sworn or made those gestures, Dad would have been furious. It was also scary when Father talked about death and burials. There was a story about a coffin that floated in the muddy water after a storm and another that had to be forced down into the grave, because it was too long. The corpse had been a giant. In the end, Dad and the sexton had had to stand on the coffin to get it underground and even then they buried it at a forty-five-degree angle. It seemed strange to Thomas that his father could laugh at death. It seemed strange when he changed from his ordinary clothes into his robes, the long black cassock and starched white surplice, when he raised his arms outward and upward at the end of the blessing, so that he was like an angel. “May the Lord bless you and keep you!” His voice rang around the brown stones of the church. “May the Lord cause his face to shine upon you!” Later, the same man would chase Thomas and his brother back to bed if they crept down the stairs to spy on guests. “Scalawags!” he yelled. Sometimes he got seriously angry with Thomas’s brother and spanked him. “I will have the last word,” he said. “I will thrash the stubbornness out of you.” It was frightening. But reassuring, too, in a way. Thomas had never been spanked, that he could recall. I was the good boy, he realized. Or the shrewd one. When Thomas was nine or ten, his father had had a breakdown. “Nervous breakdown” was the expression they used then. He had been supposed to preach. The moment had come to go up into the pulpit, but he had been unable to. He had had to go home. Perhaps the pagan people of Blackpool had finally got the better of him. Afterward, Thomas’s family had gone on the longest holiday they ever took together. A month in Devon. They had stayed in an abandoned zoo, of all things, sleeping in old animal houses that had been converted into holiday cabins. Soon after Father’s breakdown and that holiday, they had left Blackpool and moved to London. This was one of the watersheds, and, looking back, Thomas realized that his memories of Father from this point on were rather different, rather sadder. The expression “new challenge” was used, though Thomas didn’t know who had said it. Dad was given a new challenge: a big church in a thriving well-to-do suburb of London. People in high places believed in him. He was a man who needed to give energy where energy would be well received. An evangelical cannot thrive in a world of May Queens. Or not for long. At school, Thomas had to drop his northern accent to avoid being laughed at. Did Father have to change his accent in the pulpit? To suit the good folk of North London? Thomas had no recollection. Thinking about this now, he found it odd. Life had slipped by unnoticed. Or perhaps he, Thomas, at ten years old, had been so focussed on his new life—the need to make new friends, the new vicarage with the big garden, the bus to school, and later the bus and tube to another school, right in the heart of London—so taken by all this novelty that he had barely noticed his father, who went on preaching in much the same way, it seemed to Thomas, albeit from a different pulpit. Did he have any recollection of talking to Father, one on one, during this period, in his adolescence, about anything that mattered? Girls, sex, religion, smoking, drinking? He did not. He really didn’t. What Thomas did remember, though, was the growing antagonism between his father and his brother, and his father’s frustration over his sister’s failure at school. He remembered these things because they had caused him pain. His sister was a good Christian, but not smart. One day, she had run away from school, because she couldn’t face her teachers. Father was angry with her. She locked herself in the bathroom, and he banged on the door with his fists. “You shall come out!” Mother tried to mediate, but she was shocked, too: they hadn’t expected this of his sister. Meanwhile, his brother grew his hair long, smoked cigarettes and dope, drank, had inappropriate girlfriends, and listened to evil music. But he did well in school and could beat Father at chess, which was not easy. Thomas saw clearly now how his father had failed to see things clearly then. He had failed to accept that his daughter was not going to do well at school and that his son was not going to be a staunch Christian. He had allowed these entirely ordinary developments to frustrate him beyond measure. He had castigated himself. He saw the failings as his own, because it was unthinkable that they could be God’s. Meanwhile, Thomas did well enough at school and toed the line at church. He was sent to a school some miles away, to keep him from his brother’s evil influence. And his behavior was exemplary. Thomas did not smoke or listen to psychedelic music, and, when he swore, it was out of the earshot of parents and sister. Yet even Thomas was not quite what his father wanted. He preferred literature to the sciences, and Father was convinced that the truth lay in the sciences, the sciences and theology. Everything else was wishy-washy humanism. At church, Thomas was more obedient than fervent. He went to church only because he would feel guilty if he didn’t. He would feel he had let his parents down. Of course, he would have preferred it himself if he had felt fervent about church. He would have liked to like his duties. It would have been such a relief. But, try as he might, he didn’t. All this was in the air but never talked about. Father could hardly complain, because there was objectively nothing in Thomas’s behavior to complain about. Father could confront Thomas’s sister when she hid in the bathroom instead of going to school. He could confront Thomas’s brother when he was caught smoking at his bedroom window or when he started to paint pictures of naked women and said he wanted to go to art college. For better or for worse, there was a relationship there; there was heat. Father would bang on the bathroom door; he would shout. Sometimes he would even strike Thomas’s brother, then afterward he’d be fearfully friendly, because he had overdone it. He would embrace him, and Thomas’s sister, too. But there was nothing he could shout at Thomas about. So, in a way, Thomas didn’t have a relationship with his father, as the others did. Now that he thought about it, Thomas could not remember a single conversation with his father throughout his teens. Nothing. Not one exchange of any import or intimacy at all. When he had found that verse in the Bible, “I know thy works, that thou art neither cold nor hot,” he knew the words were meant for him. His father was a hot man. His balding dome flamed with color when his anger got the better of him. His brother was a cool customer. “Temper, temper,” he needled their sister. But Thomas was neither. “So then because thou art lukewarm,” the Good Book said, “I will spue thee out of my mouth.” That was how God felt about it. Mr. Lukewarm, Thomas thought. I am Mr. Lukewarm. It was a Saturday evening now, and Thomas was alone, sitting at his computer screen. It had been a pleasant enough day—he had gone swimming, shopping, had lunch with a friend. But now he began to feel anxious. Now he began to understand where all this was leading, these reflections that he had avoided for thirty years. The truth was that although he had talked to a lawyer about divorce, although he had got the documents, Thomas still hadn’t quite done the deed. He saw that now. The thought of that final confrontation with his wife, the signing of the documents, pained him. You are marooned, Thomas told himself. Mothballed. For the depression. He thought again of that rainy Saturday morning when, short of breath and nauseated, his father had led his younger son in the awesome promise: With this ring . . . with this ring . . . I thee wed . . . I thee wed. First his father’s voice, then his own, as they stood face to face at the bottom of the chancel steps. With my body . . . with my body . . . I thee worship . . . I thee worship. It seemed to Thomas now that that must have been the most intimate moment they had ever known. In the name of the father . . . In the name of the father . . . and of the son . . . and of the son. How old had Father been that day, the day before his cancer was diagnosed, the day of the very last ceremony he would ever perform, not knowing it was the last? Fifty-nine. Dad had been fifty-nine. How old was Thomas now? Fifty-eight. Thomas was electrified. This was what he had come back to his father for. To ask himself what the man’s life had been like in his fifties, when the family melodrama was over and the decisive battle lost. But easy does it. Put it all in order, Thomas thought, before jumping to conclusions. Go back. Back back back to adolescence. “The siege was yesterday.”Buy the print » The most memorable development that had to do with his father, the most decisive watershed, was the Charismatic Movement. His parents had at first resisted, then succumbed to the excitement. It must have been an evangelical version of the ’68 aberration, the need for upheaval and change. Certainly there was an American influence. Soon Mother and Father were reading out I Corinthians 12 at every opportunity, St. Paul’s account of the gifts of the spirit: there were words of wisdom, gifts of healing, gifts of prophecy. Then, one Sunday morning, the curate raised his arms on the chancel steps and spoke in tongues. It sounded babbled and weird, and the man’s face was ecstatic. This was the baptism in the spirit. Needless to say, many parishioners were disgusted. Then Thomas had heard his father and his mother doing the same thing in their bedroom. Babbling. Then his father had declared in church that he believed in these gifts—it was the Renewal they had all been praying for—and he, too, had spoken in tongues from the chancel steps and raised his arms to Heaven in ecstasy when singing a hymn. Thomas couldn’t remember now which hymn. All hymns at the time had seemed painful to him, laden with sad sentiment, with some sticky emotion that held you back. To sing a hymn was to struggle through warm mud, to feel the impossibility of ever growing up and being free. Very soon, the pressure on the children began. They, too, must be baptized in the spirit. They, too, must speak in tongues. It was never declared overtly, but it was obvious that if you weren’t, if you didn’t, then you couldn’t be part of the inner fellowship, the core family. His sister got there in no time at all. In no time at all, she was babbling away and praising God and talking about the Latter Days. It made school exams seem rather less important. Thomas fudged it, of course. Thomas pretended he was on board, but mostly studied for his O levels. His parents wouldn’t want to stop him studying, would they? Thomas did try to see if he could speak in tongues; he might even have liked to, had it come naturally. With all the sincerity he could muster, he asked God for guidance and hazarded a few nonsense words; they were not convincing. Meanwhile, people noticed that he did not raise his hands during the hymns. He couldn’t. All in all, it was getting harder and harder to keep your head down. Sitting at his computer screen now, Thomas saw that Father had embraced this heady Charismatic stuff to break a deadlock, to make something happen in his life. He hadn’t been able to go to sea like his own father. He hadn’t become a missionary in exotic lands. It was true that many souls had been won for Jesus, but then they had drifted away again. People blew hot and cold. The May Queen had been abolished, but no doubt she had returned after the reforming vicar had grown too depressed and disheartened to climb the pulpit stairs. There had been the new challenge in London, and he had risen to it—he had done well, the congregation had flourished—but his daughter had failed at school, his older son was an atheist, a smoker, and a libertine, and his youngest child a mere conformist, a cowardly sail-trimmer. Father had written a book in those years, on the Holy Trinity, but it had not been accepted. Or, rather, it had been accepted, but only by some minor publisher, not the publisher he’d wanted. It had not made an impression. Exactly what was in the book Thomas didn’t know. His father hadn’t talked about it, though Thomas was not so stupid, even in his mid-teens, that you couldn’t talk to him about a book. So if Father hadn’t talked about his book on the Holy Trinity it was because he was scared of exposing his ideas to his son’s skepticism. Or maybe he didn’t want to push this lukewarm lad into a position where he would have to declare himself. Either way, they hadn’t spoken about it. They hadn’t spoken about anything. Then suddenly this mad wave of enthusiasm was flowing through the church; there was talk of healing and the spiritual power to transform the world. Frustrated, Thomas’s father had gone for it. To prove the worth of a weapon you must use it. For six months, a year, the tension in the family soared. They all became more and more themselves. Violently, dangerously themselves. His father prayed and prophesied. His sister was a shrill echo. His brother made fun, hissing and sniggering like a demon. His mother wept; this unkindness would bring her down with gray hairs to her grave. In response, Thomas was intensely well behaved. He hid in his good behavior. In his room, he hung posters of football teams and tinkered with old valve radios. If he could have become invisible, he would. From downstairs came the sound of his sister banging out “Onward, Christian Soldiers” on the piano. Very soon, things would come to a head. In his small flat, Thomas had put on the kettle for tea. Now he changed his mind and poured himself a beer. He honestly couldn’t recall the details, exactly how or why it had happened, but one evening, in the lounge, around midnight, they exorcised his brother. Thomas was fifteen. His brother had come home late. Perhaps smelling of dope or drink. From his bedroom, Thomas heard shouting and started to go downstairs. The lounge door was closed. A pale-green door. From behind it came shouts and the chants of prayers, the piano, a hymn. “Yes, Lord, yes!” And his brother was shouting, too. “Leave me alone! Get your hands off me! Let me go! You’re all fucking crazy!” Thomas stood on the stairs, looking at the pale-green paint on the door, listening. His whole family was in there. His father, his mother, his sister, his brother. The curate, too, by the sound of it. The loathsome curate with his ecstatic babble. They were all there, behind that door in that room, where a real drama was taking place. The drama between people who are hot and people who are cold. Thomas was outside. Thomas had not rushed down the last steps, burst into the room, and yelled at them to stop this nonsense. Thomas was young. He was afraid. He was excluded. He was not really on anyone’s side. He didn’t want to be like his parents, but he didn’t like the way his brother provoked them. Because thou art lukewarm I will spue thee out of my mouth. Was this, Thomas wondered, why he was on his own now, forty and more years later, on a Saturday night, bivouacked on a metaphorical mountainside, with no one beside him? Because he was lukewarm? And if it was, was it really a problem? Thomas rather liked his apartment, didn’t he, and his quiet cold evenings. When the exorcism had failed, when Thomas’s brother wasn’t purged or broken but continued to be who he had always been, when the desired transformation did not take place and life returned, if not to normal, then certainly to monotony and flatness, as when a flood withdraws after the tempest, what had his father’s life been like then? How had he been able to go on, to traverse day by day the grim domestic mudscape that was left? The nine sad mothballed years before the cancer choked him? A year after the exorcism, Thomas had gone on a last holiday with his parents, to Deal, on the south coast. This was where his father and mother had spent their honeymoon. They even got the same room in the same hotel, right on the seafront. But there wasn’t much joy now. Thomas felt too old to holiday with his parents. His brother and sister were elsewhere. His parents seemed deflated, directionless, particularly his mother. They were going through the motions. They were trying to revive something. Father gritted his teeth. He suggested that he and Thomas rise early and take a swim before breakfast. It would be bracing. Thomas would have preferred to sleep late but didn’t want to disappoint. So they got up at seven, put on their swimming trunks, crossed the road to the sea, laid their towels on the pebbles, and waded in. The days it rained, they put the towels in plastic bags. The sea was gray. Thomas could still see his father’s body, birdlike but paunchy. His skin was dead white, his old red trunks baggy and slack. When the waves came up to his thighs, he would stop for a while, moving his hands back and forth in the cold water, crouching a little after a wave passed to keep his wrists covered, standing on tiptoe when the next wave rose to keep it off his crotch. “Wonderful air,” he shouted to Thomas. “So fresh.” He made a theatre of puffing out his chest and breathing deeply, and when finally he ducked his head into the water he would come up sputtering and protesting and flapping his arms. It was the theatre of someone trying to turn grayness into fun, trying to find a reason to rejoice. Thomas was aware now that he hadn’t been much help to his father. He’d launched into the first big wave and swum steadily out to sea. When he’d stopped and turned, treading water, the Reverend Sanders had been a small bald figure in a vast expanse of gray. The years after that yielded nothing. Father started using aftershave and wearing colored shirts, even silk cravats. He looked quite the dandy. For Christmas, one gave him bath salts or body lotion. After lunch, he snoozed in an armchair, his trousers loosened. At dinner, he was as impatient as ever. He scraped the custard off his plate and hurried off to his sermons. That was the one time when he really came alive: preaching, persuading, seducing even, in his robes, from the pulpit. To Thomas’s brother, years on, Father had apologized. So his brother said. An awkward, hurried apology about the “too much religion we drummed into you.” And once, when Thomas came home late and was in the kitchen drinking coffee, his father had come down to pick at beef bones in the fridge and, with his mouth full, muttered, “I suppose it has been all right, in the end, this monogamous life.” Had that been an invitation to talk? Thomas drank another beer and emptied a pack of nuts into a dish. He closed the document on his computer screen. What sort of life could his father have lived if he had openly declared that he no longer believed, no longer wanted to preach, no longer wanted his marriage? It was unthinkable. Mother would have been destroyed. His sister, and perhaps his brother, too, in a way. Thomas went back in his mind to those morning swims at Deal. Now that he thought about it, there had been a kind of melancholy father-and-son intimacy about them. He remembered the pebbles dark with dew, their slippery hardness when he took his plastic sandals off a couple of yards from the water. Dad put his glasses in his sandals, so as to be sure where they were. “What can you see without them?” Thomas asked. “The sea,” Father said, laughing. “The sky.” After a warm bed, the water was icy about your ankles. The breeze was chill. The pebbles were painful underfoot. Father began his spluttering routine, then his slow, blind breaststroke. Thomas put his head down and dived. He swam strongly out toward the dark horizon. Stroke after stroke. A powerful freestyle. He was showing off, of course, declaring the vigor and victory of youth. At the same time, it had been a pleasure to have his father there, in the water behind him, between him and the shore. He had felt protected somehow. He remembered that. Now Thomas has swum out too far, and he stops and turns. He treads water, looking back at England’s coast, the long sweep of quaint, decaying façades, the pale clouds. The sea is all around, a slow gray swell. Dimly, he hears his father’s voice. “Tommy! Tommy!” Where is he? There. A wave rises and his father’s head with it. A small white dot. I can see him, Thomas thinks, but with his poor eyesight he can’t see me. “Tommy! Hey, Tommeee!” He’s worried for me, Thomas realizes. He’s worried that I’ve gone too far and may never make it back.

There’s an adorable waitress at the coffee shop next to my house. Benny, who works in the kitchen there, told me that her name is Shikma, that she doesn’t have a boyfriend, and that she’s a fan of recreational drugs. Before she started waiting tables at the coffee shop, I’d never been in the place—not once. But now you can find me perched on a chair every morning. Drinking espresso. Talking to her a little—about things I read in the paper, about the other customers, about cookies. Sometimes I even manage to make her laugh. And when she laughs it does me good. I’ve almost invited her to a movie a bunch of times. But a movie is just too in-your-face. A movie is one step before asking her out to dinner, or inviting her to fly off to Eilat for a weekend at the beach. Asking someone to a movie can mean only one thing; it’s basically like saying, “I want you.” And if she isn’t interested and she says no, it all ends in unpleasantness. Because of that, asking her to smoke a joint seems better to me. At worst she’ll say, “I don’t smoke,” and I’ll make some joke about stoners, and, as if it were nothing, order another short espresso and move on. That’s why I call Avri. Avri was the only person in my high-school class who was a super heavy smoker. It’s been more than two years since we spoke. I run through hypothetical small talk in my head as I dial, hunting for something I can say to him before mentioning the weed. But as soon as I ask Avri how he’s doing, he says, “Dry. They closed the Lebanese border on us because of the trouble in Syria, and they closed Egypt because of all that Al Qaeda shit. There’s nothing to smoke, my brother. I’m climbing the walls.” I ask him what else is going on, and he answers me, even though we both know I’m not interested. He tells me that his girlfriend is pregnant, and that they both want the kid, and that his girlfriend’s mother is a widow and is not only pressuring them to get married but wants a religious ceremony—because that’s what his girlfriend’s father would have wanted if he were still alive. I mean, try to withstand an argument like that! What can you do? Dig up the father with a backhoe and ask him? And all the time Avri’s talking I’m trying to get him to relax, telling him that it’s no big deal. Because for me it really isn’t a big deal if Avri gets married in front of a rabbi or not. Even if he decides to leave the country for good or get a sex change, I’m going to take it in stride. That bud for Shikma is all that’s important to me. So I throw this out there: “Dude, someone somewhere has some product, right? It’s not for the high. It’s for a girl. Someone special I want to impress.” “Dry,” Avri says again. “I swear to you, I’ve even started smoking Spice, like some kind of junkie.” “I can’t bring her that synthetic shit,” I tell him. “It won’t look good.” “I know,” he mumbles from the other end of the line. “I know, but, right now, weed—there just isn’t any.” Two days later, Avri calls me in the morning and tells me that he may have something, but it’s complicated. I tell him I’m ready to pay for the expensive stuff. This is a onetime thing for me, and I only need a gram. “I didn’t say ‘expensive,’ ” he says, annoyed. “I said ‘complicated.’ Meet me in forty minutes at 46 Carlebach Street and I’ll explain.” “Complicated” is not what I need at the moment. And, from what I remember back in high school, Avri’s “complicated”s are complicated indeed. When it comes down to it, all I want is a single bud, even a joint, to smoke with a pretty girl who laughs at my jokes. I don’t have the headspace right now for a meeting with hardened criminals, or whoever it is who lives over on Carlebach. Avri’s tone on the telephone was enough to stress me out, and also he said “complicated” twice. When I get to the address, Avri’s waiting by his scooter with his helmet still on. “This guy,” he says to me, panting as we climb the stairs, “the one we’re headed up to see, he’s a lawyer. My friend cleans his house every week, but not for money—she does it for medical marijuana. He has a bad cancer of the something—I’m not sure which part—and he’s got a prescription for forty grams a month, but can barely smoke it. I asked her to ask him if he maybe wants to lighten his load a little more, and he said he’d discuss it, but insisted that two people come, I don’t know why. So I picked up the phone and called you.” “Avri,” I say to him, “I asked for a bud. I don’t want to go to some drug deal with a lawyer you’ve never met before.” “It’s not a deal,” Avri says. “He’s just a person who requested that two of us stop by his apartment to talk. If he says something that doesn’t sit right with us, we say goodbye and cut our losses. Anyway, there won’t be a deal today. I don’t have a shekel on me. At most, we’ll know we’ve got things rolling.” I still don’t feel good about it. Not because I think it’ll be dangerous but because I’m afraid it’ll be unpleasant. I just can’t handle unpleasant. To sit with unfamiliar people in unfamiliar houses, with that kind of heavy atmosphere looming—it does me bad. “Nu,” Avri says, “just go up, and after two minutes make like you got a text and have to run. But don’t leave me hanging. He asked that two people show up. Just walk into the house with me so I don’t look like an idiot, and one minute after that you can split.” It still doesn’t sit right, but when Avri puts it that way it’s hard for me to say no without coming off like a penis. The lawyer’s last name is Corman, or at least that’s what’s written on the door. And the guy’s actually all right. He offers us Cokes and puts a lemon wedge in each glass with some ice, like we’re in a hotel bar. His apartment’s all right, too: bright, and it even smells good. “Look,” he says, “I’ve got to be in court in an hour. A civil suit over a hit-and-run involving a ten-year-old girl. The driver did barely a year in jail, and now I’m representing the parents, who are suing him for two million. He’s an Arab, the guy who hit her, but from a rich family.” “Wow,” Avri says, as if he had any idea what Corman is actually talking about. “But we’re here about a completely different matter. We’re Tina’s friends. The subject we came to discuss is weed.” “Which is more ancient—our chants or ‘Piano Man’?”Buy the print » “It’s the same subject,” Corman says, impatient. “If you give me a chance to finish, you’ll understand. The driver’s whole family is going to come out to show their support. On the side of the dead girl, other than her parents, not a soul is going to show. And the parents are just going to sit there silently with their heads bowed, not saying a word.” Avri nods and goes quiet. He still doesn’t understand, but he doesn’t want to aggravate Corman. “I want you and your friend here to come to court and act like you’re related to the victim. Make a ruckus. Make some noise. Scream at the defendant. Call him a murderer. Maybe cry, curse a bit, but nothing racist, just ‘You piece of shit’ and things of that nature. In short, the judge should feel your presence. He needs to understand that there are people in this city who think this guy’s getting off cheap. It may sound stupid to you, but things like that affect judges deeply. It shakes them up, shakes the mothballs out of those old, dry laws, rubs them up against the real world.” “About the weed?” Avri tries. “I’m getting to that now,” Corman says, cutting him off. “Give me that half hour in court and I’ll give each of you ten grams. If you scream loud enough, maybe even fifteen. What do you say?” “I just need a gram,” I tell him. “How about you sell it to me, and we call it a day? After that, you and Avri—” “Sell?” Corman laughs. “For money? What am I, a dealer? Maximum I give a baggie to a friend here and there as a little present.” “So give me a present,” I beg. “It’s a fucking gram!” “But what did I just say?” Corman smiles an unpleasant smile. “I’ll give, but first you have to prove that you’re really a friend.” If it weren’t for Avri, I’d never agree, but he keeps telling me that this is our chance and that it’s not like we’re doing something dangerous or breaking the law. Smoking dope is illegal, but screaming at an Arab who ran over a little girl—that’s not only legal, it’s downright normative. “Who knows?” he says. “If there are cameras there, people might even see us on the nightly news.” “But what’s the deal with pretending we’re family?” I keep saying. “I mean, the girl’s parents will know we’re not related.” “He didn’t tell us to say we’re related,” Avri says. “He just said that we should scream. If anyone asks, we can always say that we read about it in the paper and we’re just engaged citizens.” We’re having this conversation in the courthouse lobby, which is dark and smells like some mixture of sewage and mildew. And even though we go on arguing, it’s long been clear to both of us that I’m already in. If I weren’t, I wouldn’t have ridden here with Avri on the back of his scooter. “Don’t worry,” he says to me. “I’ll scream for us both. You don’t have to do anything. Just act like you’re a friend who’s trying to calm me down. So long as they realize we’re together.” Half the driver’s family is already there, staring us down in the lobby. The driver himself is chubby and looks really young, and he greets every new person who arrives, kissing them all, like it’s a wedding. At the plaintiff’s table, next to Corman and another young lawyer with a beard, sit the parents of the girl. They don’t look like they’re at a wedding. They look wiped out. The mother is maybe fifty or older but small like a tiny bird. She has short gray hair and looks completely neurotic. The father sits there with his eyes closed. Every once in a while he opens them for a second, then closes them again. The proceedings begin, and it seems like we’ve come at the end of some complicated process, and everything sounds kind of technical and fragmented. The lawyers just keep murmuring the numbers of different sections and articles. I try to picture Shikma and me sitting here in court after our daughter has been run over. We’re destroyed, but we’re supporting each other, and then she whispers in my ear, “I want that fucking murderer to pay.” It’s not fun to imagine, so I stop and instead I start to think about the two of us in my apartment, smoking something, and watching some National Geographic documentary about animals with the TV on mute. Somehow we start making out, and when she clings to me as we kiss I feel her chest crushed up against mine. . . . “Hyena!” Avri jumps up in the gallery and starts yelling. “What are you smiling at? You killed a little girl. Standing there in your polo shirt like you’re on a cruise—they should let you rot behind bars.” A number of the driver’s relatives are making their way in our direction, so I stand up and act like I’m trying to calm Avri down. In essence, I am actually trying to calm Avri down. The judge bangs his gavel and says that if Avri doesn’t stop screaming the court officers will physically eject him, which at the moment sounds like a far more pleasant option than interacting with the driver’s entire family, most of whom are now standing a millimetre from my face and cursing and shoving Avri. “Terrorist!” Avri shrieks. “You deserve the death penalty.” I have no idea why he says that. But one guy, with a huge mustache, gives him a slap. I try to separate them, to get between him and Avri, and I catch a head butt to the face. The court officers drag Avri out. On the way, he gets in one last “You killed a little girl. You plucked a flower. If only they’d murder your daughter, too!” By this time, I’m already on the floor on all fours. Blood runs from my nose or from my forehead—I’m not exactly sure. Just as Avri delivers the bit about the driver’s daughter being killed as well, someone lands a good solid kick to my ribs. When we get back to Corman’s house, he opens his freezer, gives me a bag of frozen peas, and tells me to press hard. Avri doesn’t talk to him or to me, just asks where the weed is. “Why did you say ‘terrorist’?” Corman asks. “I told you specifically not to mention that he’s an Arab.” “ ‘Terrorist’ isn’t anti-Arab,” Avri says, defensive. “It’s like ‘murderer.’ The settlers also have terrorists.” Corman doesn’t say anything to him. He just goes into the bathroom and comes out with two little plastic bags. He hands me one and throws the other to Avri, who almost fumbles the catch. “There’s twenty in each one,” Corman says to me as he opens the front door. “You can take the peas with you.” The next morning at the café, Shikma asks what happened to my face. I tell her it was an accident. I went to visit a friend and slipped on his kid’s toy on the living-room floor. “And here I was thinking that you got beat up over a girl,” Shikma says, laughing, and brings me my espresso. “That also happens sometimes.” I try to smile back. “Hang around with me long enough and you’ll see me get beat up over girls and over friends and defending kittens. But it’ll always be me getting beat up, never me doing the beating.” “You’re just like my brother,” Shikma says. “The kind of guy who tries to break up a fight and ends up getting hit.” I can feel the bag with the twenty grams rustling in my coat pocket. But instead of paying attention to it I ask her if she’s had a chance to see that new movie about the astronaut whose spaceship blows up, leaving her stranded in outer space with George Clooney. She says no and asks me what that has to do with what we’re talking about. “Nothing,” I confess, “but it sounds pretty awesome. It’s 3-D, with the glasses and everything. Do you maybe want to go see it with me?” There’s a moment of silence, and I know that after it passes the yes or the no will come. In that moment, the image pops back into my head. Shikma crying. The two of us in court, holding hands. I try to change channels, to switch to the other image, the two of us kissing on my ratty living-room couch. Try, and fail. That picture, I just can’t shake it.

Where had they come from, the Eykelbooms? The boys suspected Indiana, Illinois. Some crude and faceless Yankee state. The Eykelbooms had emerged and emigrated from it. It was a tiny, deeply threatening invasion. The boys watched them unpack their moving truck, which was actually a dump truck, their belongings piled into the bed and covered with a large heavy tarp. The truck belonged to Eykelboom’s father. No one else on the street owned a dump truck, and this might have been cool had the owner of the truck not been Eykelboom’s father. They weren’t neighborly, of course, aside from Eykelboom himself, an only child, who tried to befriend the other boys, to no avail. His parents made no effort to help their son or to make any friends themselves. His mother almost never appeared outside the house, except for trips to the grocery store, and his father did only when he drove the dump truck to and from work, blowing his customized musical horn to announce his arrival, which everyone came to truly despise, or when he was mowing the grass on weekends. He did this shirtless, as if to show off his physique. He was tall, with a big rectangular head, a flattop haircut that wedged to a point over his small, square forehead, and droopy, arrogant eyes. Long loose limbs that looked apelike and strong, huge hands and feet, but thin and wiry legs as if he’d descended from a jackrabbit or some fleet herbivore. As he pushed the lawnmower back and forth across the grass, he sucked in his gut like a movie actor. You could always tell that it was sucked in because it wasn’t muscled, just smoothly concaved by the sucking. Eykelboom walked around doing the same thing, sucking in his belly, sticking out his chest, atop which stood the same long neck, slack face, flattop haircut. He was slighter and softer than his old man, gangly. He ran with his head thrown back, legs flailing, chest thrust forward as if to break the wire. Eykelboom’s old man didn’t like Eykelboom much, either, which was a pretty awful thing, even to the boys. The boys wore cutoff jeans and faded torn T-shirts, went barefoot or in begrimed old sneakers without socks. They had blackened fingernails and knuckles, tired-boy eyes, scarred knees and elbows and ears, snotty noses, unwashed hair spiked with sleep and itchy with sand, scabby stubbed toes, unbrushed teeth flecked with tomato peel and pieces of grass. They got around on foot or on one of a squad of banged-up bicycles that seemed interchangeable and were left crashed into shrubbery or tangled at the center of a forlorn front yard or askew in the street like the rusted remains of extinct, mechanized animals. Eykelboom, neatly dressed, clean, quiet, was not a troublemaker, as far as the other boys could see. Yet every so often his father would come out of the house, call to him, and stand there waiting. Eykelboom’s face would blanch, he would freeze for a moment, then mutter something fatalistic and trudge over to his old man. Together they would turn and go into the house, and the boys wouldn’t see Eykelboom for a couple of days. They might see him being driven to school by his mother instead of taking the bus, but he never looked out the car window. At school, he kept his head down, staring at the book on his desk, sat alone in the cafeteria, and somehow disappeared at recess. Then one day he’d be back, attempting once again to be their friend. What he had done to bring down his father’s wrath no one knew. Some private transgression. But once the boys realized that they could use it against him they did. Of course, it was common in those days for parents to hit their children, with everything from hairbrushes to toilet brushes, flyswatters, switches, bare palms, rolled newspapers, and folded belts. But, usually, there was a good and obvious reason. The boys couldn’t be sure, but it seemed like Eykelboom’s old man did it just to do it, to keep the boy in check. Secretly, they envied him this. Their fathers were generally ineffective, weak. They were low-ranking white-collar, nervous, inattentive, soft, unhappy. In a way, they were not even there. I’d like to see it, the older Harbour twin said. I’d like to watch. That’s pretty sick, said Wayne, a brooding olive-skinned boy whose father was a temperamental judge whom everyone except Wayne seemed to fear. You’re a fucking freak, he said. Wayne and the older twin wrestled, making high whining sounds, and then stopped when Wayne pinned the twin, who got up and walked off up the hill toward his house, sulking. Wayne stood there panting, looking after him. Then he stared for a while at Eykelboom’s house before heading off toward his own, without speaking to the other boys. Eykelboom was not supposed to play in the big drainage ditch at the end of the street, down near the turnaround. It was not a cul-de-sac, as no one had ever heard the term. Plus a cul-de-sac should have houses rimming its perimeter, houses with neat yards and diagonally symmetrical lots, whereas one part of this turnaround was bordered by a bamboo-filled ravine; another by a dirt path that led to a small bass-and-bream lake infested with water moccasins; and a third section opened up to a big new house with a low-lying front yard that filled with brown water every heavy rain. Just before you reached the turnaround, on the north side of the street, a buried storm drainpipe that ran from the top of the hill down to the bottom emptied out into the drainage ditch. The sandy earth there had eroded into a small gully that threatened to undermine the street itself. The boys built dams in the storm runoff that came from the pipe, dug treacherous caves into the sandy bank, hid in the ditch to lob dirt clods at cars that had come down their street by mistake, thinking it a throughway. Their parents didn’t worry about the ditch, believing that the boys had sense enough (they did not) to be careful and look out for themselves. But Eykelboom’s family was from someplace very different, and Eykelboom’s old man did not allow him to run loose. He was expressly forbidden to go into the big drainage ditch. Nor was he allowed to run loose in the dense tract of virgin forest that began just behind the houses on the north side of the street. These woods were owned by a cantankerous old man named Chandler, who lived in an old plantation-style house perched on the edge of the woods as if he were the resident troll whose mission it was to guard them. Chandler had once owned the land under the boys’ houses, too, before the developer bought it from him and paved what had been a dirt road to the lake and built a dozen small ranch-style houses on a dozen small lots, six on either side of the street. At the end of the turnaround was the big house that the developer had built for himself. When Eykelboom declined to go into the woods, the boys called him a coward and headed in without him. He stood in the street and watched them cross a vacant lot to the section of barbed-wire fence where they normally entered the woods. Then he called out, Wait, I’m coming, and rushed to join them. There was a creek that ran the length of the woods. At its lowest point it widened into a series of waist-deep, muddied pools, creating a swamp. In the clear, shallow areas of the creek higher up, there were minnows and tadpoles, and crawfish to catch. But the pools were murky and more likely to harbor snakes and snapping turtles, so the boys avoided them. They took Eykelboom on a tour of their main trails through the woods. They pointed out areas that even they hadn’t explored, then doubled back and showed him the layout of the creek from near its source down to the pools. When the boys saw that he was standing on a spot that had been weakened by the creek’s current, they exchanged glances but said nothing. The bank gave way and Eykelboom plunged into a pool up to his belly. The boys pulled him up, but he was inconsolable. My dad’s going to kill me, he said. Why don’t you just get wet all over, and you can say someone sprayed you with a hose? the older Harbour twin said. It won’t work, Eykelboom mumbled. It won’t matter. Why don’t you just go change before he gets home from work? She’d tell him. Well, someone else said, we’d better hide out in the ditch and hope you can dry in the sun before your old man comes home. “Are these the Top Ten Commandments?”Buy the print » It was the younger (by five minutes) twin who said this. The twins were not identical. The younger one looked like a boring businessman shrunk to the size of a child. The older one was taller but as scrawny as a starved stray cur. Eykelboom reminded them that the ditch would only make it worse. He looked like he was about to cry. A couple of the boys felt sorry for him, along with a vague annoyance. Actually, Wayne said, the woods would be worse. He seemed very calm. Eykelboom was bringing something out in Wayne. It’s not just someplace you’re not supposed to be, Wayne said. It’s trespassing. We could all go to jail just for being here. The boys looked at Wayne. They knew that the woods’ owner, Mr. Chandler, hated them because they built forts and camped out in there and of course made campfires, which meant that they could potentially start a forest fire and burn it all down. This was a small and pristine forest where some older boys swore they’d seen an ivory-billed woodpecker, supposedly extinct for longer than the boys’ parents had been alive. But the boys’ parents seemed to think nothing of their trespassing in Mr. Chandler’s woods. If they knew that Chandler hated the boys being in there, they showed no sign. Chandler sometimes used his shotgun when he detected the boys’ presence in his woods, striding into his great back yard and firing off loads of bird shot that pecked down through the broad low canopy of leaves like a shower of rain. Once the middle McGowen brother took a pellet on the pad of his pinkie finger. The finger stayed swollen for a week. His older brother advised him to say it was a bee sting. Now, after Wayne’s words, the boys were having visions of prosecution for trespassing, a previously unthinkable prospect. A squad of deputies would be dispatched to the woods to round them up and take them to juvie lockup, inking and logging their filthy little fingerprints, taking their urchinesque mug shots, interrogating them, hauling them to court, tossing them into some kind of Boys Town chaos of a prison. Then Wayne said, There’s nothing else you can do. You have to go hide in the ditch. It’s too shady in here. You’ll dry out in the sun and your old man will never know. The boys all knew he wouldn’t dry out there. It was a humid day. One of those days when their mothers had to leave the wash on the line for a second or third day to dry it fully. The boys knew that Eykelboom was fucked, either way, that it was just a brief matter of time before his old man would come home in his ridiculous vehicle, rolling down the hill blowing his ridiculous melodious horn as if everyone, as if anyone, would be delighted to know that he was home again, home again, and that as soon as he went into the house and said, Where’s Ikey? and Eykelboom’s mom said, I don’t know, he’s been out all afternoon with the other boys, Eykelboom’s old man would be out in the street himself, hands on his hips, so you could tell even with a T-shirt on that he was sucking in his gut to look like he did calisthenics and never ate anything other than raw lean meat, calling out Eykelboom’s name in a voice that said as clear as God’s that he was planning on putting some kind of hurt on Eykelboom. They waited, squatting low, watching the dirty water trickle from the big pipe and down the drainage stream. Every few minutes one of them climbed up to peek over the rim of the ditch to see if a car was coming down the hill. On the far wall of the ditch were the ruins of the caves they’d built earlier in the summer. They’d built four of them. Wayne’s had been the most elaborate, with two chambers, the smaller just large enough for Wayne to crawl into and curl up like a baby. They’d come out one morning to find them all destroyed. Someone had taken a shovel and caved in the caves. Someone afraid that his child would be in there when the sandy soil above collapsed and smothered him. It could have been anyone, really, someone’s parent or even a city worker cruising by on inspection. But the boys knew it had been Eykelboom’s father. They imagined him sneaking down there in the middle of the night with a shovel and a flashlight. No one else had seemed to notice the caves. No one else hated the ditch. No one else was so aggressive. Their fathers did not take action. The boys’ fathers tended to ward off worldly trouble with idle, halfhearted swats as if at lazy bees. Eykelboom’s old man, although odd, even laughably weird, was potentially frightening, very humanly alive. They couldn’t even greet him, Hello, Mr. Eykelboom, without getting a smirk in return, as if they had tried to speak but had failed because they were retarded. Sometimes he even laughed at them. They were terrified of him. They wanted not to kill him but for something stronger than themselves to crush him. As for Eykelboom’s mother, they knew nothing, although they assumed that she was at least somewhat like their own mothers, sometimes angry and sometimes sad, obsessed with the outrageous burden of housework and cooking, even if they had paying jobs as well. Women who rushed out of their back doors to smoke, pacing, on the patio or as far from the house as possible, who could not be spoken to until it was bearable for them to be in their lives again, which could take minutes, hours, or days. A car came down the hill and the boys hunkered low. It whooshed past, fast and unseen, and turned in to the long drive of the developer’s house at the end of the turnaround. The developer and his wife zoomed up and down the street, and occasionally waved but never stopped. The boys had waved back when they were younger and the street was newer but they did not anymore. They realized that they were negligible. Occasionally someone’s dog or cat that lacked sense or agility was crushed beneath one of their big, sleek cars. The developer’s wife would come and apologize. She seemed gigantic, loud. Her teeth were enormous. They feared her. Like their parents, they toiled in the developer’s fields like serfs, outwardly quiet and obedient. They took out their need for violence upon one another. After they heard the developer’s car door open and shut, they heard Eykelboom’s father’s dump truck turn onto their street. They heard it come over the top of the hill and slow with a throaty downshifting of gears, and heard the horn blow out its melody, the opening bar of “Dixie,” which was idiotic, not to mention deliberately provocative, given that he was from Indianaland. They heard the truck lunge into the Eykelbooms’ driveway and stop. They heard Eykelboom’s father get out and go into the house. Eykelboom’s eyes in his long, heavy head were wide open, limpid, staring at nothing. He squatted there very still, wet and steaming in the sultry heat. Then they all heard the Eykelbooms’ front door open and shut again. Eykelboom seemed to be holding his breath, his lips trembling. His father called out in a hard low tenor, a voice all the stranger for being rarely heard in regular speech. Emile! he called. Emile! He called Eykelboom Ikey only when he wasn’t mad. Eykelboom closed his eyes, took a deep breath through his nose, and let it out. I better go on up, he said. Wayne said, Let’s sneak out the back way into the woods. The boys looked at Wayne. He was looking at Eykelboom in a way that was meant to seem very casual but was actually very intense, as if no one else were there but Eykelboom and Wayne. Eykelboom said, It’ll just be worse if he has to come get me. He squatted there a moment more, then stood and said, I’ll see you guys, and climbed the side of the ditch and onto the street. They could see his father standing beside the dump truck, waiting on Eykelboom, who trudged along like a boy condemned, arms at his sides, big flattop head hanging down. His father didn’t even glance at the boys peeking up over the edge of the ditch as he slowly pulled his belt from its loops, folded it in half, and stood waiting, yea, like an executioner, the leather belt hanging from his big, bony right hand, his wire-rimmed spectacles gleaming in the light. When Eykelboom reached him, neither said anything. The father turned and followed Eykelboom through the carport and into the house. The younger twin said, derisively, You guys, in an exaggerated Yankee accent. Then his brother said, in the same tone, Emile. He said, He’s beating the shit out of Emile right now. The three McGowen boys said nothing, their small similar mouths squinched up. “Do you have any idea how fast you were evolving?”Buy the print » The middle brother looked at Wayne, who was staring at the Eykelbooms’ house with his eyes half-closed and his mouth slightly open, as if he were daydreaming or lobotomized or asleep on his feet. Then just his eyes moved and he was looking back at the middle brother, who felt electrified by his stare and struggled to look away. It was a while before they saw Eykelboom again. They almost forgot about him. They forgot to hate him. Then one day he stepped out from behind a large shrub that grew wild in the middle of the vacant lot and followed them into the woods without their knowing it. One of their forts was a four-story tree house built with lumber stolen from an outbuilding below Mr. Chandler’s house. It was an old servants’ quarters that had been overtaken by kudzu and brush and it was far enough away from the main house and dilapidated enough that the boys had been able, like insects or spirits, to dismantle it from beneath the kudzu’s cover. They worked at it furtively, slipping pieces of the little house into the throat of the woods without once alerting Mr. Chandler. They’d built the tree house on a hill, the first floor six feet above the ground, using three large straight pines as its foundation beams. The trees formed a rough triangle and the boys had nailed the floor joists into the trees, laid the floorboards across these, built the walls without openings except for a narrow strip between the wall and the next floor, and then nailed on more boards to form a flat roof, which served as the floor of the next story, until they had four levels. They’d stolen the remains of a roll of tarpaper from a construction site and laid sheets of this over the roof of the top room. The only entrance was a small hole in the floor next to one of the trees, which they climbed using pieces of two-by-four nailed into the trunk as a stepladder. There was also a hole in the ceiling of the top room, so that they could stick their heads out and watch for the approach of Mr. Chandler or one of their parents. Once, the twins’ mother had drunk too much gin and wandered into the woods and been lost until the boys found her, standing in a small clearing in her nightgown, barefoot and weeping. On this day, one of the twins was on the roof for only a minute or so before coming back down. He said, Eykelboom’s down there. The boys were incensed that Eykelboom had followed them to this fort. It was their newest and grandest fort and they had not shown it to him when they had given their tour. Wayne climbed up through the lookout hole and then climbed back down. He looked at the oldest McGowen brother, who turned to the middle brother and said, Go down there and tell him to go away. What if he asks to come up? the middle brother said. He can’t come up, Wayne said. He’s not allowed. Make him leave, the oldest brother said. Go on. The youngest McGowen brother watched them from a dark corner, his eyes bright with excitement. The middle brother slowly made his way down the ladder steps, floor by floor, and stuck his head out of the entrance hole when he reached the lowest level. There stood Eykelboom, gazing into the woods with a stoic, if forlorn, expression. The middle brother figured he had heard their discussion. Eykelboom fixed a strangely calm expression on him, and said nothing. Ikey, the middle brother said. You have to go away. That’s right, Emile, one of the twins said from inside the fort. Eykelboom looked suddenly angry. I’m not going away, he said. I can’t let you in, the middle brother said. You don’t have the right, Eykelboom said. I can stand here all day if I want to and you can’t do anything about it. The middle brother pulled his head back through the entrance hole and looked at the other boys, who had climbed down to the first level to listen. It’s a free country, Eykelboom said then, louder. Which was such a Yankee thing to say. Fred-e-rick, Wayne said in a mock-tired way, drawing out the middle brother’s given name, a name that everyone knew he did not like. Climb down there and make him go away. The middle brother whispered back, How? Wayne’s eyelids fluttered. He was smoothing the paper on a cigarette he’d lifted from his old man’s pack. The boys had been planning to smoke it. Wayne put the cigarette into the corner of his mouth and spoke. Beat. His. Ass. The middle brother did not want to go down there and beat Eykelboom’s ass. Eykelboom was big, and like his brothers the middle McGowen was small. But he couldn’t not do it. He would become lower than Eykelboom. With a swelling of sadness and doom in his heart, he descended the two-by-four ladder to the ground. Eykelboom had crossed his arms like a stubborn, determined person on a television show, like in a musical movie or something. He was even taller and broader than the middle McGowen brother had realized. He reached out and gave Eykelboom a push, to no real effect, and Eykelboom looked away, reddening. The middle brother pushed him again, harder, and Eykelboom let out a high-pitched wail of rage. He flailed at the middle brother with his long heavy arms, landed one big blow against the middle brother’s head, and turned to leave. The middle brother reeled and his head rang with the blow but then he heard something and saw Wayne peering at him through the entrance hole. Wayne said, Are you going to let him just do that to you? The middle brother caught up with Eykelboom and leaped onto his back as if he were riding piggyback. Eykelboom twirled like an off-kilter top but the middle brother hung on, afraid to let go. They spun toward one of the fort’s foundation trees and slammed up against it. The middle brother fell off without a word and Eykelboom ran away toward his house, keening in his outrage and grief. Possibly it was outraged grief. The middle McGowen brother lay on the ground, stunned. Wayne stuck his head through the entrance hole and looked down at him for a moment. Way to go, he said. Come on up. The middle brother roused himself slowly and climbed back into the fort. The boys lit and smoked Wayne’s cigarette, passing it around. The middle brother took a puff and passed it on. You did good, his older brother said to him. But he didn’t feel good about any of it. He was using every bit of will he had not to cry, which would have made it all even worse. Eykelboom disappeared. He wintered in his brooding or became as spectral as a ghost, there but not there in any evidence. Then summer came again and he drifted or sifted back into visibility, though he kept himself peripheral and quiet. He didn’t try to merge. He didn’t speak much or look at anyone directly. He’d changed, still angry but also disaffected, detached. The boys saw him do things on his own. Leave his house and go into the ditch without apparent concern, then disappear out of it into some other place, down to the lake, or into the woods, emerging hours later seeming unchanged. Sometimes his old man would be waiting for him, sometimes not. It didn’t seem to matter. He affected or displayed a studied nonchalance, leaving his father to look weak somehow as he stood waiting in the driveway holding his belt, or just balling up his rawboned workingman’s hands as if they contained all his rage, his face showing nothing. Once Eykelboom stayed out in the woods all night at one of the boys’ forts, the oldest one, now abandoned deep in the woods. The boys found the evidence days later. Ashes and burned logs in the pit from a fire they hadn’t made. A ball of blackened foil in the ashes that had helped cook something they hadn’t eaten. What looked like Eykelboom’s big sneakers’ prints in the soft dirt around the pit. How he had got away with that, they had no idea. Then they realized that he probably hadn’t but didn’t care. Things began to happen. The long-abandoned shack on the lake’s far bank burned down. It had once been a caretaker’s cabin. The boys had planned to steal its lumber for a new fort. The police, in the paper, called it arson. A girl’s stolen bike was found down in the bamboo, looking as if someone had smashed its frame with a sledgehammer. A row of new saplings in the Porters’ immaculate yard was destroyed, every trunk snapped. The twins’ dog Bummer, a giant golden retriever so ancient that he never left the carport anymore, vanished one night, his body never found. The boys knew it was Eykelboom. Wayne went up to him and said so. He said, We know it’s you doing all this crazy shit. So what if it is? Eykelboom said. So you’ll pay for it, Wayne said. Says who? “Is there a doctor in the house, and more important, another magician?”Buy the print » If you killed Bummer, the older twin said, you deserve to die. Eykelboom stood there with his chest poked out, like his old man, staring back at Wayne. Says me, Wayne said. Says we. You can’t hurt me, Eykelboom said. You can’t prove I did anything. And you don’t hate me any more than I hate you. So fuck you. None of the boys had ever actually had those particular words said directly to them before, nor had they quite used them yet. Wayne stood chest to chest with Eykelboom. Then Wayne gave him that half smile and walked away. Eykelboom didn’t move. He looked around at the other boys. They looked back for a moment and then went home. Before going into the house with his brothers, the middle McGowen brother glanced back. Eykelboom was still there in the fading light in the vacant lot across the street from his house, looking at nothing. He didn’t exactly disappear again. He slipped in among them now and then, silent or all but so, like a strange intelligent dog, a stray. He slipped in when they were out in the twilight, one minute not there and the next minute beside them. It was spooky. One night, in just such a moment of quiet apparition, they heard Mr. Chandler’s horse down in the woods. It sounded as if it were being attacked. The shrieking sound it made prickled their skins. Mr. Chandler often let the horse run loose in the woods, but never so far as they knew at night. More than one of them had been almost trampled while walking along a narrow trail, hearing the hooves very suddenly near, diving aside as the horse came galloping by in a heavy, heaving, wheezy blur. He was a big bay stallion. When he got out of the barn he needed a run, and there wasn’t a lot of open ground in the woods. The meadows tended to be small, no more than thirty or forty yards across. So this horse was a woods horse and he ran the trails. And maybe, they figured, that desire to run the trails was also a product of fear, because the older boys always said they’d seen bobcats in there. A couple of them even said they’d seen a panther, or had heard it scream. The boys themselves had neither heard nor seen sign of a bigger cat, but a panther was not out of the question. In this place, in this time, in this small town bordered all around by woods and rural land, any animal wanting to broaden its territory needed only to cross a few two-lane, tree-loomed roads into this or another swath of undisturbed forest. There were deer in Chandler’s woods, so why not panthers, too? When Mr. Chandler’s stallion ran in the woods, he ran like a horse with his tail on fire, or a horse with a big cat swiping at his flank, a horse who never knew from which tree something might leap onto his back and sink fangs into the spine ridging his long, exposed neck. In short, whenever he got his exercise, this horse was effectively mad with terror. You didn’t want to get in his way. They heard the horse call out again. At first they stood very still and listened, and then Wayne said they had to go see. He came back from his house with a pair of flashlights, and Eykelboom followed them all in. They made their way across the vacant lot, through the fence, down the trail toward the swamp, the horse’s trembly bellowing growing louder. Soon they saw lantern light glowing down in the swamp, and heard the voices of men in between the sounds of the horse. They left the trail and entered the swamp, picked their way across muddy grass islands toward the yellow glow. The air was chilled, and stank like rotten roots and sewage. Kerosene lanterns hung from swamp tree branches, illuminating the horse, up to his withers in one of the black mud sinkholes. Two men who lived in old cottages behind Mr. Chandler’s house were trying to get the horse out by levering him with thick pine boards stuck deep in the muck on either side of him. Mr. Chandler, his boots and pants heavy with mud, a battered town Stetson jammed down on his head, held a rope that was clipped to the stallion’s halter. The men helping were mud-caked head to toe, as if they’d emerged from the swamp itself to free the beast from their own sightless world. The boys stood in a bunch just outside the dissolving rim of the lanterns’ light, perched on soft hummocks of unstable swamp grass and moss, constantly shifting their feet to knobs of firmer ground. The boards and the men and the lanterns and Mr. Chandler’s harsh commands made the horse more afraid, and he bucked helplessly in the sinkhole. He strained and trembled, struggling to pull his forelegs free, pushing with his powerful hind legs. Every now and then he raised his head and his neck went rigid and his eyes rolled around in fear and that awful sound they’d heard from the street came from his throat, through his long clenched teeth. The middle McGowen brother heard Eykelboom just behind him. Eykelboom said quietly, If it was my horse I’d go ahead and cut its throat. The middle brother looked over his shoulder and saw Eykelboom staring at the horse, as they all had been, but he didn’t seem disturbed. Eykelboom pulled a Boy Scout knife from his pocket, opened the blade and felt the edge with his thumb, then folded it and put it away. The middle brother almost said, Are you in the Scouts?, but didn’t. The men and the horse worked so hard their bodies shuddered with fatigue. Finally the horse was able to free his forelegs and in a series of scrambling lunges he was out. He shook his big head and yanked the halter rope from Mr. Chandler’s hands, knocking the old man into a sinkhole. He splashed straight for the boys, leaping from little island to island, busted past them with a blast from his nostrils, jumped the creek, and galloped away in the dark toward higher ground. Help me out of this goddam hole, they heard Mr. Chandler say to the men. One of them leaned down to give him a hand, then took a lantern down from a tree branch. Mr. Chandler reached up for the other lantern and when he swung it around he saw the boys standing there like silent swamp elves. You boys get the hell out of here, he said. You stay the hell out of my woods. As they were leaving, they heard him ask one of the men to repair the fence around the swamp the next day. He said something about those little heathens having cut it. The middle McGowen brother wondered if this was true. If it had been Eykelboom. Or Wayne. He thought it was the kind of thing that either one of them might do. Wayne just to do it. Eykelboom with some inscrutable sense of purpose. Even a boy could tell that it was Eykelboom against the whole world. Using Wayne’s flashlights, they made their way back down the dark trails and crossed the fence out of Mr. Chandler’s property. When Wayne said to Eykelboom, You know he’s going to be waiting when we come out, they all stopped. Eykelboom stood there for a minute. Fuck him, he said, I’ll just stay here. He turned and walked back into the woods. When the boys reached the vacant lot, they could see Eykelboom’s old man standing alone in his front yard, lit by the street lamp two houses down. He held something in his hand that wasn’t a belt—a stick of some kind, thin like a thrashing cane. The boys stopped and looked back toward the dark woods. They glimpsed the faint contrast of Eykelboom’s white T-shirt farther down the trail. Eykelboom’s father spotted them and called out, Where’s Emile? When he began to move toward them, they took off running. “You were right—I do feel more productive standing.”Buy the print » They leaped over the fence back into the woods. When the younger twin caught his foot on the barbed wire and fell, hollering, they stopped to see if he was O.K. But Eykelboom’s father was still coming toward them through the vacant lot, the stick in his hand, and they took off running again down the dark trail. They listened for Eykelboom ahead of them as they ran. Instead they heard his father, following. They ran in the dark on the trail that followed the creek to the crossing upstream. They tripped over vines and roots and stumbled in ruts but kept going. They scrambled down the upper creek bank, jumped the creek, and ran up the other side. They heard Eykelboom’s father far back on the trail—he had no flashlight and didn’t know these woods—calling out to his boy. The boys called out then, too—Eykelboom! Emile! Ikey! they called in turn. They searched for an hour or so, then made their way back to the street. They left the woods at a different spot, crossed the fence behind the Porters’ yard, and peered out from the side of their house. A police cruiser was parked half on the street, half in the Eykelbooms’ yard. Eykelboom’s father was talking to a cop near the open door of the cruiser. His mother was there, just outside the carport, in a house robe. A couple of people stepped out of their homes, curious. Cautiously, the boys went over. Eykelboom’s father stiffened when he saw them. He still had the stick in his hand. He looked at the cop, then at the boys. He said, What have you little bastards done with my boy? What have you done? I’ll fucking kill you if you’ve hurt him. It was hard not to run. Then Wayne said, We didn’t do anything to him. What’re you doing with that stick in your hand? What were you going to do to him before he ran away? What do you mean ran away? Eykelboom’s father said. The cop peered at the boys from beneath his visor. That’s right, Wayne said. He beats Ikey all the time. He made him run off. The cop’s narrowed eyes moved from Wayne to the other boys to Eykelboom’s father. He looked at the stick. I’ll handle this, Mr. Eykelboom, the cop said. Please put the stick down and go inside your house for now. Eykelboom’s father didn’t move, just stood there, staring at Wayne. The boys tensed, thinking he might rush them. Mr. Eykelboom, the cop said again. Eykelboom’s father slowly turned his head to look at the cop, then at the stick in his hand. He gripped the stick even harder and went inside, walking past his wife without seeming to see that she was standing there in her robe and slippers, pale and speechless, her face drawn up as if there were no teeth in her head. The cop asked the boys questions. Had they seen Eykelboom in the woods? Did they know where he might be? He got on the radio, talking. There’s a swamp in there, Wayne said, and told him about the horse and Mr. Chandler and his men. The cop studied him for a long moment. Then he got on the radio again. He said something into the mic about Mr. Chandler. In a little while an old pickup truck grumbled down the street and parked next to the cop’s cruiser and Mr. Chandler got out, wearing clean clothes. He talked to the cop, glanced at the boys, shook his head. The cop said something else and Chandler shrugged. The cop got on the radio again. Chandler lit a half-smoked cigar he’d pulled from his shirt pocket, leaning against his truck, gazing into the shadows of his woods. Eventually, two sheriff’s deputies dressed in hunters’ overalls went into the woods with high-beam flashlights. Soon another cop pulled up with a dog in his car and they went in, too. Neighbors came out and gathered near the cruisers, whose lights were whirling and lighting up the houses and windows and trees in the yards. People shared coffee and beer, smoking, speaking in quiet voices. Occasionally someone said something that made others laugh and then stop themselves. Mrs. Eykelboom had followed her husband inside. After a while the neighbors went home. Chandler got into his truck and left. The boys were called home by their parents. The two younger McGowen brothers watched from the dark window of the bedroom they shared, in their house next door to the Eykelbooms’. They saw the deputies make their way out of the woods, looking beat. The cop with the dog came out. The police talked among themselves. Their radios squawked. They turned off their cruisers’ flashing roof lights. Then an unmarked black car arrived. Two men in suits got out and went up to the carport. They talked to Eykelboom’s father at the door. It looked like Eykelboom’s old man wouldn’t let them in. Then he closed the door and the cops all left. For days the police and deputies searched the woods with a pack of hunting dogs. A helicopter from the National Guard base flew over low and slow, a couple of military men in the bay looking down, searching. Drown teams pushed heavy rakes through the muck pools in the swamp. They dragged the pools near the end of the creek, then the lake below the turnaround. Police checked the bus and train stations, though the boys had never known Eykelboom to have money that he could have used for travel. Outlying farmers were queried, their barns searched. The local TV anchorman seemed to hint that something had been wrong among the Eykelbooms. But no one ever reported, It is said that Eykelboom’s old man regularly beat the holy shit out of him. Among themselves, the boys knew that was why, idiots. Weeks passed like time under water. Winter came and went, then spring. The Eykelbooms, Mr. and Mrs., moved away. Their house sold within a month. This time it was bought by an old man who had worked at the creosote plant. Newly retired, the boys’ parents said. Occasionally the retired man’s grandson came to see him and spend the day. He was a shy boy, but nice enough, with a small face and downy blond hair. But his grandfather wouldn’t let him play with the boys. When they approached, the grandfather came out and gave them a dark glare and called his grandson back in the house. Wayne went off. He didn’t move away, or disappear like Eykelboom, but he stopped hanging out with the boys. They rarely saw him. The oldest McGowen brother had become interested in other things, as well, and pretended the younger two did not exist. The boys effectively disbanded, a tacit dissolution. They abandoned their forts. It was said that Chandler now kept wild dogs in the woods and fed them deer he shot from his back porch and dragged to a clearing below his house. Then, one late summer night, the woods burned, flames leaping up to the low evening clouds and turning them red and orange. Forest crews managed to contain the fire, but the woods were destroyed, their ruins like a blasted, ghosted battlefield, stumps and blackened fallen trunks releasing swirls of smoke into winter. Spring seedlings worked their way from the dirt, but before they could begin to grow a man in a backhoe churned through the mud and dug a long trench from the lake to the swamp, draining it. Another crew laid a large concrete pipe and installed storm drains on what looked like concrete chimneys emerging from the pipe. Then they covered the pipe with dirt. A grader smoothed and levelled the land. The developer had been waiting, knowing that Chandler would sell. During all this, a policeman kept watch, in case there were human remains. There were no remains. No one would ever know what became of Eykelboom. If he was alive somewhere, the boys felt sure that no one knew who he really was. They believed he had made some kind of miraculous escape. Into some other life that he had made up and now occupied, somewhere else. He had passed himself off as older, used his outsized body to get a job in construction, a factory, an oil field. He rarely spoke to anyone, no more than was absolutely necessary. He was a mystery to everyone who knew him now, wherever he might be. They all grew older, in the visible world, scattered carelessly into this life or that. The boys’ parents sifted into their private, forgotten histories, crumbs of memory in a landscape of stained tablecloths and kitchen floors. The two younger McGowen brothers, having survived their older brother as well as their parents, had become drinkers, and sometimes when they were together, drinking and talking, the middle brother would mention Eykelboom. Together, over time, they dismissed the old theory of escape and began to envision Eykelboom deep down in what used to be the swamp. They imagined that the sinkholes there were deeper than anyone had ever known. In spite of the elaborate drainage system the developer installed, the area where the swamp had been was never developed. It had never stabilized. The brothers imagined Eykelboom there, preserved and whole, curled up in a cold, fluid clay, drifting very slowly with the earth itself. His fists lay knotted against his cheeks, his knees to his chest, his face closed tight in an infinite, chilled gestation.

There is proud happiness, happiness born of doing admirable things in the light of day, years of good work, and afterward being tired and content and surrounded by family and friends, enjoying a sumptuous meal, ready for a deserved rest—sleep or death, it would not matter. Then there is the happiness of one’s personal slum. The happiness of being alone, and tipsy on red wine, in the passenger seat of an ancient recreational vehicle parked in a campground outside Seward, Alaska, staring into a scribble of black trees, unable to go to sleep for fear that at any moment someone will get past the toy lock on the R.V. door and murder you and your two small children, sleeping in the alcove above. This was Josie’s situation. They’d landed in Anchorage yesterday, a gray day without promise or beauty, but the moment she’d stepped off the plane she’d found herself inspired. “O.K., guys,” she’d said to her exhausted, unhappy children. They had never expressed any interest in Alaska, and now here they were. “Here we are!” she’d said, and she’d done a celebratory little march. Neither child had smiled. She’d piled them into this rented R.V. and driven off, no plan in mind. The manufacturers had named the vehicle the Chateau, but that was thirty years ago, and now it was falling apart and dangerous to its passengers and to all who shared the highway with it. But after a day on the road her kids seemed fine with the crumbling machine, the close quarters, the chaos. Her kids were strange but good. There was Paul, seven years old, a gentle, slow-moving boy with the cold caring eyes of an ice priest. He was far more reasonable and kind and wise than his mother, but then there was Ana, only four, a constant threat to the social contract. She was a black-eyed animal with a burst of irrationally red hair and a knack for assessing the most breakable object in any room and then breaking it. The Lower Forty-eight was full of cowards and thieves and it was time for mountains and people of truth and courage. So Alaska. She had been a dentist and was no longer a dentist. She’d been sued by a desperate woman who claimed that Josie should have seen the tumor on her tongue during a routine cleaning. Unwilling to fight a dying woman, Josie surrendered. Take it all, she’d said, and the dying woman had done just that. And then the father of Josie’s children, her ex-husband, a spineless, loose-bowelled man, had, improbably, found a new, second woman to marry him. He wanted the kids there, but Josie, who’d got nothing from him for years, thought, Well, no. And what could better grant her invisibility than this, a rolling home, a white R.V. in a state with a million other white R.V.s? He could never find her. But she had yet to see the Alaska of giants and gods. What she had seen so far did not feel like frontier. It felt like Kentucky, only colder and far more expensive. Where was the Alaska of magic and clarity and pure air? This place was choked with the haze of some far-off forest fire, and it was not majestic, no. It was cluttered and tough. And where were the heroes? Find me someone bold, she asked the dark trees before her. Find me someone of substance, she asked the mountains beyond. She had been born a blank. Her parents were blanks. All her relatives were blanks, though many were addicts, and she had a cousin who identified as an anarchist. But otherwise Josie’s people were blanks. They were from nowhere. To be American is to be blank, and a true American is truly blank. So Josie was a truly great American. Still, she’d heard occasional and vague references to Denmark. Once or twice she heard her parents mention some connection to Finland. Her parents knew nothing about these nationalities, these cultures. They cooked no national dishes, they taught Josie no customs, and they had no relatives who cooked national dishes or had customs. They had no clothes, no flags, no banners, no sayings, no ancestral lands or villages or folktales. When she was thirty-two, and had wanted to visit some village, somewhere, where her people had come from, none of her relatives had any idea at all where to go. One uncle thought he could be helpful. Everyone in our family speaks English, he said. Maybe you should go to England? The next day was nothing, nothing at all, only the bright sun and the cold wind coming desperately over the obsidian water. They slept in and walked around. They discovered a train car set up by the shore which the kids wanted to explore but found was closed. They went into town, into Seward, a mix of actual fishermen and fish, and souvenir shops selling shirts bearing cartoons of moose. They meandered down the boardwalk, and for a time watched a happy little tugboat chugging to and fro across Resurrection Bay. Josie was drawn to it and wasn’t sure why. “Look out!” Paul said. Her son was speaking to otters. The bay was full of otters, and Paul was worried the tug would run them over. But the animals moved themselves effortlessly out of the path of the tug and then reformed, six of them floating like furry detritus amid a mess of chartreuse seaweed. The otters were absurdly cute, stupidly cute, swimming on their backs, holding actual rocks on their bellies, using these rocks to break open shellfish and then enjoying their meals like mustachioed men. Such an animal could not be conceived by any self-respecting Creator. Only a God made in our image could go for that level of animal kitsch. Now an older man sitting on a bench was looking at Josie’s children. “You kids like magic?” the man asked. He seemed to be leering. These lonely old men, Josie thought, with their wet lips and small eyes, their necks barely holding up their heavy heads full of their many mistakes and the funerals of friends. Josie nudged Paul. “Answer the nice man.” “I guess,” Paul said to the mountains beyond the man. Now the old man was delighted. His face came alive, he lost twenty years, forgot all the funerals. “Well, I happen to know there’s a magic show tonight on our ship.” “You own a ship?” Josie asked. “No, no. I’m just a passenger. I’m Charlie,” he said, and extended his hand, a pink and purple tangle of bones and veins. “Haven’t you seen the Princess docked here? It’s hard to miss.” Josie came to understand that this stranger was inviting them, her and her two kids, all of them unknown to this man, onto the cruise ship docked in Seward, where, that evening, there would be an elaborate magic show featuring a half-dozen acts, including, the old man was thrilled to convey, a magician from Luxembourg. “Luxembourg,” he said, “can you imagine?” “I want to go!” Ana said. Josie didn’t think it mattered much that Ana wanted to go—she had no intention of following this man onto a magic-show ship—but when Ana said those words Charlie’s face took on a glow so powerful Josie thought he might ignite. Josie didn’t want to disappoint this man and her daughter, who continued to talk about the show, and who were virtually floating upward with joy and inspiration. But was she really about to follow an old man onto a cruise ship in Seward, Alaska, to see a Luxembourgian magic show? “We’re allowed to have guests, I think,” the man said as they walked up the gangplank. The kids were astounded, stepping slowly, carefully, as if they were walking on the moon, holding the ropes on either side. But now their host, this man in his seventies or eighties, was suddenly unsure if he could have friends over. He stopped in the middle of the gangplank. A few dozen elderly passengers in windbreakers went around them, carrying their small bags of Seward souvenirs. “Let me talk to this man,” Charlie said, and motioned to them to hang a few yards back. So Josie stopped, and her kids peered down into the black water between the dock and the gleaming white ship. Josie watched as Charlie approached a man in a uniform. Charlie and the man swung around a few times to inspect Josie and her children. Finally Charlie turned back, waving to them, a relieved smile overtaking his face. He called them to come aboard. “I met someone famous today, but I don’t think he’ll remember me.”Buy the print » The ship was garish and loud, and crowded, full of glass and screens—the décor was casino crossed with Red Lobster crossed with the court of Louis XIV. The kids were loving it. Ana was running everywhere, touching delicate things, bumping into people, making elderly women and men gasp and reach for walls. “I think it starts in twenty minutes,” Charlie said, and then again looked lost. “Let me see if we need tickets.” He wandered off, and Josie knew she was a fool. Parenting was chiefly about keeping one’s children away from unnecessary dangers, avoidable traumas, and disappointments, and here she had dragged them to Alaska, and had driven them, and their feces—the R.V.’s bathroom meant convenience but also the transportation of human waste—around the worst parts of the state, and then to Seward, where no one had recommended they go, and now she had them following a lonely man onto a ship designed, it seemed, by the insane. All to see magic. Luxembourgian magic. Josie paged through the years of her life, trying to remember a decision she had made that she was proud of, and she found nothing. Finally Charlie returned, holding the tickets in his hand like a bouquet. “Are we ready?” There was an escalator, an escalator inside a ship. Charlie was ahead of them, and rode upward while looking back at them, smiling but nervous, as if worried they might flee. The theatre seated at least five hundred and all within was burgundy—it was like being inside someone’s liver. They sat in a half-moon booth near the back, Paul next to Charlie. A waitress in bright red hurried by, but Charlie made no move to order anything. Josie asked for lemonades for the kids and a glass of Pinot Noir for herself. The drinks arrived and the lights went down. Josie relaxed, anticipating a few hours of not having to do anything but sit and watch in silence. Charlie had a different plan. The show started, and Josie realized that Charlie intended to talk throughout. And the words he most wanted to say were “See that?” Charlie would see something that every member of the audience had seen, and then would ask Josie and her kids if they’d seen it, too. Ana would say, “See what?,” and Charlie would then explain what he had seen, talking through the next five minutes of the show. They made a beautiful pair. The first magician, a pretty man in a tight silk shirt, had, it seemed, been told to make his act more personal, so his monologue returned again and again to the theme of how he had always welcomed magic into his life. He’d opened the door to magic, said hello to magic. He’d learned to appreciate magic in his life. Did he say he was married to magic? Maybe he did. It all made little sense, and the audience seemed lost. “Life is full of magic if you look for it,” the magician noted, breathlessly, because he was moving around the stage in a thousand tiny steps, as a woman in a sparkly one-piece bathing suit vamped behind him with long strides. The pretty magician produced some kind of flower from behind a curtain, and Josie struggled to see this as magical. She and Charlie clapped, but few members of the audience joined them. Her children didn’t clap; they never clapped unless she told them to. Were they not taught clapping in school? The magician was not impressing this audience, though who could be easier to impress than five hundred elderly people in windbreakers? But they were waiting for something better than carnations produced from behind curtains. Josie began to feel for this man. He’d been a magician in grade school, no doubt. He’d been pretty then, too, with lashes so long she could see them now, fifty feet away, and as an adolescent, apart from his peers but not concerned about this, he had driven with his mother forty miles to the nearest city, to get the right equipment for his shows, the right boxes—with wheels!—the velvet bags, the collapsing canes. He’d loved his mother then and had known how to say so, with conviction, perhaps with a flourish, and his unguarded love for her had made his friendlessness unimportant to him and to her, and now she was so proud that he had made it, was a professional magician, travelling the world making magic, welcoming magic into his life. And after all that, Josie thought, these elderly assholes won’t clap for him. Josie downed half her Pinot and gave the pretty magician a whoop. If no one else appreciated him, she would. Every time he asked for applause, which was often, she yelled and whooped and clapped. She found the waitress, ordered again, and downed a second glass. She cheered louder and whooped again. Her children looked at her, unsure if she was being funny. Charlie turned to her and smiled nervously. Now the long-legged woman was helping the pretty magician into a big red box. Now she was turning it around and around. It was on wheels! Everything in the act had to be on wheels, so it could be turned around. It was a rule of magic that all boxes must be turned around and around, to prove there were no strings, that no one was hiding just behind. But if something wasn’t turned around would the audience revolt? Did they ever ask, Excuse me, why hasn’t someone turned the box around? Turn the box around! My God, turn that box around! Now the sparkly assistant opened the box. The pretty man was not in the box! Josie whooped again, clapping over her head. Where had he gone? The suspense was fantastic. And now he was next to them! Suddenly a spotlight was on their table, or near it, because the pretty man was next to them. “Holy shit,” Josie said, loud enough that the pretty man, whose hands were outstretched, again asking for applause, heard her. He smiled. Josie clapped louder, but again the rest of the audience didn’t seem to care. He was up there, she wanted to yell to them, now he’s here! You fuckers. Up close, she saw that the magician was wearing a tremendous amount of makeup. Eyeliner, blush, maybe even lipstick, all seemingly applied by a child. Then the spotlight went dark, and he stayed for a moment next to their table, hands up, while a second magician appeared onstage. Josie wanted to say something to the pretty man, to his heaving silken silhouette a few feet away, but by the time she arrived at the right words—“We loved you”—he was gone. She turned to the stage. The new magician was less pretty. “This is the one from Luxembourg,” Charlie whispered. “Hello everyone!” the new magician roared, and explained he was from Michigan. “Oh,” Charlie said, sighing. The Michigan magician, in a white shirt and stretchy black pants, was soon in a straitjacket, hanging upside down twenty feet above the stage. With his breath labored and his arms crossed like a chrysalis, he told the audience that if he did not escape from the straitjacket in a certain amount of time something unfortunate would happen to him. Josie, trying to get the attention of the waitress, had not caught exactly what that consequence was. She ordered a third Pinot, and soon some part of the contraption holding the magician was on fire. Was that intentional? It seemed intentional. Then he was struggling in an inelegant way, ramming his shoulders against the canvas jacket, and then, aha, he was free, and was standing on the ground. An explosion flowered above him, but he was safe and not on fire. Josie thought this trick pretty good, and clapped heartily, but again the crowd was not impressed. What were they waiting for? she wondered. Bastards! Then she knew: they were waiting for the magician from Luxembourg. They did not want domestic magic. They wanted magic from abroad. The man from Michigan stood at the edge of the stage, bowing again and again as the applause dissipated until he was bowing in silence. Josie thought of his poor mother, and hoped she was not on this cruise. But she knew there was a very good chance that the Michigan magician’s mother was on this cruise. Like the pretty magician’s mother, she was proud, she was retired, she travelled the world clapping for her son. How could she not be on this cruise? Now a new magician appeared. He had a high head of gleaming yellow hair and his pants were somehow tighter than the pants of his predecessors. Josie had not thought this possible. “I hope this guy’s from Luxembourg,” Charlie said, too loudly. “The police are here. You might want to put on something less fugitivey.”Buy the print » “Hallo,” the magician said, and Josie was fairly sure he was from somewhere else. Perhaps Luxembourg? The magician explained that he spoke six languages and had been everywhere. He asked if anyone in the audience had been to Luxembourg, and a smattering of applause surprised him. Josie decided to clap, too, and did so loudly. “Yes!” she yelled. “I’ve been there!” Her children were horrified. “Yes!” she yelled again. “And it was great!” “Lots of visitors to Luxembourg, I am pleased,” the magician said, though he didn’t seem to believe those who had applauded, least of all Josie. But by now, her spirit dancing in the glorious light of her third glass of wine, Josie believed she had been to Luxembourg. In her youth, she’d backpacked through Europe for three months, and wasn’t Luxembourg right there in the middle of the continent? Surely she’d been there. Did that one train, the main train, go to Luxembourg? Of course it did. She pictured a beer garden. In a castle. On a hill. By the sea. What sea? Some sea. The magician from Luxembourg did his tricks, which seemed more sophisticated than those of his predecessors. Maybe because they involved roses? Before him there had been merely carnations. The roses, this was a step up. Women holding roses appeared in boxes, boxes on wheels, and the man from Luxembourg turned these boxes around and around. Then he opened the boxes, and the women were not there; they were somewhere else. Behind screens! In the audience! Josie clapped and hollered. He was wonderful. The wine was wonderful. What a good world this was, with magic like this on ships like this. What an impressive species they were, humans, who could build a ship like this, who could do magic like this, who could clap listlessly even for the magician from Luxembourg. These fucking assholes, Josie thought, trying to single-handedly make up for their sickening lack of enthusiasm. Why come to a magic show if you don’t want to be entertained? Clap, you criminals! Even Charlie wasn’t clapping enough. She leaned over to him. “Not good enough for you?” she snarled, but he didn’t hear. Now Luxembourg was gone and another man was making his way onto the stage. He was rumpled, his hair reaching upward in seven different directions, and he was easily twenty years older than the others. Another man. Where were the women? Were women not capable of magic? Josie tried to remember having seen or heard of any female magician and couldn’t. My God, she thought! How can that be? What about Lady Magic? Why do we accept all these men, all these silken heavy-breathing men? And now this one, this crumpled one—he made no effort at all to be pretty like the others. He had no lovely assistant, and, it soon became clear, he didn’t intend to do any magic. She looked for the waitress. Where was the waitress? There was only the rumpled man standing at the edge of the stage. He was telling the audience that he’d worked for some time at a post office, and had memorized most Zip Codes. He’ll get murdered, Josie thought. What kind of world is this, when a man from the post office follows Luxembourgian magic, and why were they, she and her kids, on this ship in the first place? With incredible clarity she knew, then, that the answer to her life was that at every opportunity she’d made precisely the wrong choice. She had been a dentist for a decade but for most of that time had not wanted to be a dentist. What could she do now? Then it came to her. She was sure, at that moment, that she was meant to be a tugboat captain. My God, she thought, my God. At thirty-eight, she finally knew! She would lead the ships to safety. That was why she’d come to Seward! There had to be a tugboat school in town. It all made sense. She could do that, and her days would be varied but always heroic. She looked at her children, and saw that Paul was now leaning against Charlie, asleep. Her son was asleep against this strange old man, and they were in Seward, Alaska. For the first time, she realized that Seward sounded like “sewer,” and thought this an unfortunate thing, given that Seward as a place was very dramatic, and very clean, and she thought it very beautiful, maybe the most beautiful place she’d ever been. It was here that she would stay, and train to become a tugboat captain at the school that she would find tomorrow. All was aligned, all was right. And now, looking at her son sleeping against this man, this old man who was leaning forward, listening to this other man talk about the post office, she felt her eyes welling up. She took a final sip from her third Pinot and wondered if she’d ever been happier. No, never. Impossible. This old man had found them, and it could not be coincidence. This town was now their home, the site of this ordained and holy reunion, and all the people around them were congregants, all of them exalted and now part of her life, her new life, the life she was meant for. Tugboat captain. Oh, yes, it had all been worth it. She sat back, knowing she’d arrived at her destiny. Onstage, the post-office man was telling the audience that for any of them who gave him a postal code he could tell them what town they were from. Josie assumed that this was some sort of a comedy bit, that he was kidding about the postal job, but immediately someone stood up and yelled, “59715!” “Bozeman, Montana,” he said. “West side of town.” The crowd erupted. The cheers were deafening. None of the magicians had elicited this kind of enthusiasm, nothing close. Now ten people were standing up, shouting out their Zip Codes. Josie, despairing of the waitress’s return, downed half a glass of water, and that act, the dilution of the holy wine within her, took her away from the golden light of grace she’d felt moments before, and now she was sober or something like it. Tugboat captain? A voice was now speaking to her. What kind of imbecile are you? She didn’t like this new voice. This was the voice that had told her to become a dentist, that had told her to marry that man, the loose-bowelled man, the voice that every month told her to pay her water bill. She was being pulled back from the light, like an almost-angel now being led back to the mundanity of earthly existence. The light was shrinking to a pinhole and the world around her was darkening to an everywhere burgundy. She was back inside the liver-colored room, and a man was talking about Zip Codes. “O.K., you now,” the postal man said, and pointed to a white-haired woman in a patterned muumuu. “62914,” she squealed. “Cairo, Illinois,” he said, explaining that though it was spelled like the city in Egypt, it was pronounced “kay-ro,” the Illinois way. “Nice town,” he said. The audience screamed, hooted. It was a travesty. Now Paul was awake, groggy and wondering what all the noise was about. Josie couldn’t bear it. The noise was not about fire and magic and tugboats: it was about Zip Codes. “33950!” someone yelled. “Punta Gorda, Florida,” the man said. The crowd roared again. Ana looked around, unable to figure out what was happening. What was happening? Postal codes were making these people lose their minds. They all wanted to have their town named by the rumpled man with the microphone. They yelled their five digits and he guessed Shoshone, Idaho; New Paltz, New York; and Gary, Indiana. It was a melee. Josie feared that people would storm the stage and rip his clothes off. Go back to sleep, Paul, Josie wanted to say. She wanted to flee. Everything about all this was wrong, but she couldn’t leave, because now Charlie was standing up. “63005!” he called out. The spotlight found him and he repeated the numbers: “63005!” “Chesterfield, Missouri,” the postal man said. Charlie’s mouth dropped open. The spotlight stayed on him for a few seconds, and Charlie’s mouth remained agape, a black cave in the white light. Finally the light moved on, he was in darkness again, and—as if a spirit had held him aloft and suddenly let go—he sat down. “Hear that?” he said to Paul. He turned to Josie and Ana, his eyes wet and his hands trembling. “Hear that? That man knows where I come from.”

“Cell-phoning?” her mother would ask her patients when they called, and Jewel found it embarrassing. “Are you cell-phoning?” her mother would demand, waving her family away, so that she could take the call in private. Her patients were what she discouraged her children from labelling “crazy.” It was her job to listen to their problems, and then her duty to never repeat what she knew to anybody else. The town was smallish; you saw everyone at the grocery store, especially on Sunday mornings. It was never a pleasure. But, finally, Jewel understood. “Are you self-harming?” her mother was saying. Her mother’s patients were “borderline,” and their biggest issue was self-harm, which was typically, although not exclusively, cutting into their arms. Jewel suddenly understood because it was time—she was now in high school, with plenty of self-harmers. And cell-phoners, for that matter, too. “What you’re going to learn,” her mother had told Jewel more than once, “is that no one ever gets beyond high school. It’s all high school for the rest of your life.” Not true, Jewel knew, yet also true. Her brother, Robby, had left for college, and Jewel was the only child at home, the only person for her mother and stepfather to puzzle over at the end of the day, their shared project, last chance. She knew that she wasn’t as much trouble for her parents as Robby had been, and was, perhaps, disappointing as a result: she gave them no occasion to rise to. Jewel had never been arrested, never run away, never passed out drunk on the driveway with vomit in her hair. Raising Robby had been what they did. And now he was two states away, of a somewhat legal age. So Jewel was alone, after school, when the woman came to the door. She was dressed like a homeless person, like a Ren Faire lady, with a bulky floral velvet bag, which she clasped with both bangled arms as if it held a child or a dog, something heavy and unwieldy. A turkey drumstick, Jewel thought, remembering this year’s Ren Faire. The rat-a-pult. The roaring dragon in the local moatlike lake. And the personnel, those people who called themselves the Creative Anachronisms. “Where’s Claudia?” the woman demanded. “At work.” Jewel had been watching a scary movie, one her brother had sent her; the knock had literally made her jump, and her heart was still throbbing in places where it wasn’t, like her throat and her eyes. The teen-age girls in the film were out in the woods, and had split up, like idiots, per usual, guaranteeing carnage. The woman on the porch had emphatic mauve hair, ribbons and beads woven into it, makeup thick on her face, her outfit far too heavy for the New Mexico fall weather. Jewel made immediate repairs in her mind, removing layers and ornaments, a habit she’d probably acquired from living in a house that was constantly being rearranged and improved upon. She had Photoshop in her head. “I’ll wait,” the woman said, and took a seat on the brick step, her skirts hiked, her bag on her lap, arms crossed over it, head tipped sideways. Everything about her said: sigh. Jewel retrieved her camera, an old Rolleiflex that her mother and Zachary had given her. She’d have preferred a cell phone—you could hardly find film for this camera or a place to develop it—but they liked old things. Through the front window, she took a picture of the extravagant figure. The window glass was aged and wavy, which added further pleasing poignancy. A few minutes later, when Jewel looked again, the woman was gone. “Maybe I’ll just wait in here,” said a voice from the kitchen. Jewel had left the back door open for Magic, the cat, who’d been missing for four days. If she’d had a cell phone, she could have surreptitiously dialled 911. But the landline was in its little hallway niche, another antique. The whole house was retro, which, although it looked kind of great and had been the subject of a New Mexico Magazine spread, was more trouble than you’d imagine. Being stuck in the last century meant tapping into the neighbor’s Wi-Fi, watching DVDs, and having to talk on the phone, tethered by a cord and another cord, in a public place. A woman had come here once before, looking for Jewel’s mother. A sobbing woman whose interest was angry and fraught, a blue vein pulsing at her temple. Robby had still been home then. He’d been the one to invite the woman in and sit with her while they waited for their mother and Zachary to come home. This woman had been having an affair with Zachary and he’d broken it off. “What have I got to lose?” she’d asked the teen-age Robby. “I want him to suffer.” The woman had been braced for fireworks, for Claudia to fly into a rage, for Zachary to be punished. Instead, Claudia had listened boredly to the tale—the seduction, the rendezvous in Zachary’s office—and said, finally, “I know my husband better than you do. This issue predates you. It will postdate you. It isn’t personal; it’s an addiction. Simple as that. He’s merely fallen off the wagon. Either he’ll get back on or he won’t. It’s not up to me, or to you—it’s up to him. What do you think, Zachary?” Everybody had turned in his direction. And Zachary had nodded, seeming just as sad for himself as his wife was. “Mom’s a badass,” Robby had said later, when he and Jewel were debriefing. Her patients loved her for that unconventional understanding. She stood up for them; she visited their homes and talked to their problematic relatives, went to the store with them, walked them along the river, allowed them to bring their pets to their therapy sessions. She came to her children’s defense, too, with teachers or friends or the parents of those friends. She was brutally honest, blunt. She had never dressed up the fact that their real father, who was a therapist in Santa Fe, could not be trusted with them. His depression was extreme, and he was old, the father to four other, much older children, who were now his caregivers. Claudia had left him when Robby and Jewel were young, because he was too unpredictable—suicidal and perhaps delusional. A few years ago, when Robby had accused their mother of keeping their father from them, Claudia had responded by telling him to go visit. “By all means,” she’d said, “go right ahead. Take the car, take your sister. Here’s a credit card. Check into a hotel. I encourage you to get to know him.” She was sincere in this gesture. By not withholding anything, she became powerful. By throwing out car keys and credit cards and permission, she insured that they wouldn’t follow through. But it wasn’t a plan, on her part, to outfox them. Had they gone, it would have turned out as she predicted: the man was old and feeble, with children who’d compelled his attention long before Robby and Jewel were born. He was done with fatherhood now; he needed the other side of the equation, the one in which his children owed him, would care for him, would provide cute infants to be his simple objects of affection. He did not need teen-agers. Claudia could leave a person speechless, defused. “Wow,” people might respond. The thought that Zachary might have taken up with the woman who was in the kitchen now was surprising to Jewel. At least that other woman had been sexy, a blond rock-climbing instructor, pretty and tanned, earnest. This one was heavy: in heft, in mood, in wardrobe. Also hidden—her hair was dyed, her face was made up, her clothing was layered. It was difficult to imagine Zachary finding her appealing. He was a physical therapist, an athlete; he worked with the body, and he appreciated the natural, the muscled, the naked and undisguised. He had turned his habit of soliciting physical intimacy into a job. Or so Jewel had been led to believe. She liked Zachary; she didn’t want to hear that he’d once again fallen off the sex-addiction wagon. And if he had fallen off? Well, this woman was a disappointing temptress. “Her house is decorated just like her office,” the woman said, waving her hand to both allude to it and dismiss it. “All cool crap from back when. Although I do love that turquoise leather chaise,” she acknowledged, as an afterthought. So: not Zachary’s scorned girlfriend, after all, but Claudia’s patient. The woman was taking in the riot of kitchen implements that filled the room, the collection of cake plates and colorful tins, the multiple sets of nesting cannisters and Mason jars and Fiesta ware, the light fixtures made of teacups, the shrinelike mosaic of broken china above the restaurant stove, a centerpiece of a sort, a hearth. There was always something new to see here, some project just completed, a product of Claudia’s after-hours decorating, redecorating hobby. The basement was filled with toys and tools and books and appliances and crockery and frames and knickknacks, waiting to be remade into another striking display. As a child, Jewel had been allowed to draw on the kitchen walls. Over by the cat-food bowls, her mother had affixed an oval embroidery hoop around the last remaining drawing, Jewel’s actual baby teeth dotting the frame, along with some Scrabble tiles that spelled her name. The picture was of Magic eating his food. It wasn’t a bad likeness, for a four-year-old; her mother had left it there because of the little pink asterisk that was Magic’s anus, Jewel’s childish candor. The woman said, “I found this beautiful sweater? And I bought it, even though it was way out of my price range, and I gave it to her. She never wore it once. Cashmere! With Bakelite buttons!” “What color?” Jewel asked. “Ivory.” “With watering-can buttons? That one? She loves that sweater.” It wasn’t even a lie—Claudia did love that sweater. But it was difficult to find gifts for her—Jewel could sympathize with that. She’d more than once been hamstrung and frustrated, her gifts given and then unused—or traded in at a resale shop. Claudia did that regularly, afflicted as she was by zero nostalgia or sentimentality. Those emotions, she always argued, were dishonest. There were no halcyon days of yore, and it was fruitless to believe that there were. “Your mother’s a tease,” the woman said, scowling at Jewel. “She shouldn’t be like that. She pretends to be your friend, to give a shit, and then? Totally blows you off. Doesn’t wear your sweater, hardly even says thanks. I gave her a plant thing with a light in it, too, and she never used it. Is your whole house like this?” “Sort of,” Jewel said. “Does it make you claustrophobic?” “There’s always something to look at.” “Except for the actual sacrifice, all this is largely symbolic.”Buy the print » Jewel had been able to keep her bedroom free of the intensely curated clutter. But the rest of the house was chock-full, evidence of Claudia’s impeccable eye, her energy for seeking out these objects and then making them functional. Jewel knew what kind of planter lamp the stranger was describing; there was a collection of them in Zachary’s workshop. His role in her mother’s obsession was maintenance—scavenging, cleaning, restocking, repairing. She was insatiable, Jewel’s mother. On weekends, she and Zachary went to garage and estate sales; they sat head to head scrolling through eBay and Craigslist offerings. They drove states away if the deal was a good one, Jewel often along in the back seat, sitting beside a green kitchen sink the size of a horse tank, or a pink hair-drying chair, or a bundle of high-quality barkcloth destined to become drapes or a swing skirt. The phone rang. This would be Kenny, from Latin class, the senior who’d become inexplicably attached to Jewel, against her will. At school, he made a point of seeking her out between classes. It was humiliating. It made her blush every time. And he called every day at four to ask her out. His family was very wealthy, which explained his confidence. “Entitlement” was her mother’s word for it. She had nicknamed Kenny the Gentleman Caller. “You gonna get that?” the woman asked. “It’s just this guy,” Jewel said. “He wants to take me on an airplane ride or something.” Her mother and stepfather knew about Kenny, who desired Jewel, but they didn’t know about Anthony, whom Jewel desired. Brooding, surly, awkward Anthony, who was tall and hunched, his blond fro waving atop his skinny body like dandelion fluff, who had no friends, who skulked along ahead of her after school to his house down the street. She’d known of Anthony for years, but only recently had she begun to daydream about him, to seek out first in a crowd that specific soft yellow head of hair. “Tell him to fuck off,” the woman suggested. “Block his number.” “Hey, Jewel,” Kenny said on the answering machine. “Just checking in. How’s my precious Jewel?” Kenny claimed that his name, in Latin, meant handsome, and that Jewel’s, of course, meant jewel. “Catch you tomorrow,” he finished. “Ad astra per aspera! ” “He doesn’t sound so bad, but what’s that ass-ass-ass stuff?” “It’s Latin for something about failure, I think.” “Does he think speaking Latin is sexy?” Jewel shrugged; nothing about Kenny was sexy to her. “When does Claudia get home usually?” “Six-forty-five. After yoga.” “Huh. How about your brothers?” “Robby? He’s in California.” “And the other one?” Jewel didn’t want to anger the woman by informing her that there was no other brother. But there was no other brother. “What do you mean?” she said carefully. “From the picture, on her desk. All y’all on the front porch with the cat?” Jewel knew the photograph. “One guy is Robby, my brother. The other is Zachary. My stepfather.” Zachary was thirty-three, nine years younger than her mother, and did, it was true, look considerably younger. He smiled a lot and wore flip-flops and jeans and old concert T-shirts. His facial hair was sparser than eighteen-year-old Robby’s. Or perhaps it was because he didn’t involve himself with unpleasantness—didn’t follow the news or read books, didn’t pick fights or get defensive, didn’t rock the boat. That could make you seem younger than you were. “Stepfather?” The woman laughed, and Jewel felt a strange protective urge flare up for her mother. “More like boy toy. You know what they say: after forty you can have either a great butt or a great face, but not both.” “What does that mean?” “Your mom’s too skinny, that’s what it means. Her face is haggard,” she said knowingly. “I don’t think so,” Jewel said, although most of the time she was herself uneasy with her mother’s thinness; it seemed competitive. Her mother wore boys’ jeans, the same size as skinny Robby’s; her breasts were little pouches that disappeared when she stretched her arms overhead. “You look just like her,” the woman said, accusingly. In usual circumstances, Jewel knew this to be a compliment, but this time saying “Thank you” felt wrong. “You’re going to be prettier than I am,” her mother had once told her. “When we walk together, the men look at you now, instead of me.” Claudia believed that airing the feelings you might be tempted to keep secret was the way not to be sabotaged by them. She had explained this to Jewel and Robby in the aftermath of Zachary’s mistress’s visit. No need for Zachary to hide the fact that he was recovering. He needed to own and then conquer his issues. He was only as sick as his secrets, she’d said, using her fingers to make quotation marks in the air. She believed in these statements, but they were not original to her, and therefore she had to scrupulously acknowledge that. Jewel suspected that this stranger in the house was wearing long sleeves because there were scars on her arms. Jewel noticed all sorts of self-harmers these days, in stores and at school, their scars either hidden or flagrantly displayed, those white lines, notched up the arms. Was it healthy to show them? A secret those girls or women no longer felt like keeping? Or was it hostile? In either case, it frightened Jewel. The woman was on the move now, passing Jewel en route to the dining room, wandering around the table, admiring the walls and windows, the ceramic birds and photomontages, the fanned display of fashion ads from the forties, the silver oyster forks, the snuff spoons from France, the plates sporting seventies cartoons, the cloth napkins, each an embroidered object unique to a family member or close friend who often dined at this table, rolled into an equally unique and thoughtful napkin ring. All of this she circled and registered, murmuring to herself, nodding, not touching anything but obviously taking it in, and not with pleasure. More like evidence in a case she was building. Mm-hmm, ah-ha! Just as I suspected! Jewel was afraid to interrupt with any kind of word or gesture, afraid the woman would react like a startled animal, leap and claw before realizing that the motion was innocent. Jewel held a finger to her upper lip to stifle a sneeze. “I need to use the ladies’,” the woman said, heading off down the hallway. She went right in and slammed the door, clicked the lock. Jewel rushed to the mustard-yellow telephone, lifted the heavy receiver, and rotary-dialled her stepfather’s office. (Her mother’s phone always went straight to voice mail.) She said to the receptionist, “Tell Zachary to come home! It’s an emergency!,” and hung up. The bathroom door didn’t unlock for an irritatingly large number of minutes, and, when it did, the woman exited with her hair refreshed and her lipstick reapplied. She’d also removed an under-layer of her outfit, so that her arms and legs were exposed, fleshy and very tattooed. Or not just tattooed but textured, as if objects had been applied to the skin, or under it, actually: a zipper there on her upper arm, elbow to shoulder, a ring of what looked like BB’s on her calf, decorated with drawings on the flesh—flowers, vines, slashes, and drops representing wind and rain. Jewel had seen piercings before—eyebrows, noses, tongues, navels, and wide round plugs in earlobes—and she’d seen tattoos, full sleeves and neck and facial markings, but this singular oddity, the combination of purposeful bumpiness and color, was new to her. She had an urge to run her fingers over the woman’s skin, to see how that zipper felt, or to touch the tiny dots painted bright red on her leg, holly berries in a kind of perverse snaky wreath. And what else was there, in the places Jewel could not see? “Even the baño has the whole vintage thing going on,” the woman said. She’d probably used Claudia’s ivory hairbrush. Maybe she’d dipped all the toothbrushes in the toilet or scratched something profane on the wallpaper. There was no telling what she’d been up to in there. One thing Jewel knew: no pills. Those were kept under lock and key in the kitchen, in an antique bank box in the Everything Drawer. As if reading her mind, the woman asked if there was alcohol available. Mesmerized by the tattoos, Jewel motioned toward the mint-green pie cabinet behind her. Zachary had fitted it out as a wet bar, complete with hanging stemware and hooks for old-fashioned tools: zester, muddler, strainer. An aluminum Hamm’s beer cooler full of high-end beer. “Your tats are awe—,” she was saying when Zachary arrived, having run home, it seemed, from his massage practice, just three blocks away. The woman’s reaction to his appearance was to calmly draw out of her bag a knife. The knife was similar to one in their own block of knives, among the few tools in the house that were not vintage in any way. Zachary was a cook; his talents were with his hands: massage, gardening, food preparation. He was, his older wife always said, the perfect wife. Because, she would add, he also enjoyed sex. Unlike so many wives. What would she not say, in the name of telling the truth? Although it was a large knife, it was for cheese, specifically, its blade both delicately serrated and aerated to create less friction in such a thick substance. Jewel had been at the mall with Zachary when he’d bought it. The salesman had sliced through potatoes and cheese and tomatoes and plastic and rubber with both this knife and a traditional knife, to illustrate the superior ease and versatility of this new model. Zachary had purchased it, but then allowed Jewel to wrap it up and give it to him for Christmas, the perfect gift. She and Zachary got along pretty well. At this moment, she halfway wished she hadn’t phoned him. Minus the knife, the scene might have played out without real consequence. “And here’s the trophy husband!” the woman crowed. Zachary took in the tableau with his usual slacker calm. Today’s T-shirt said “Psycho Killer Qu’est-ce Que C’est,” and featured a light-bulb-shaped head wearing sunglasses. Jewel’s favorite of his shirts was one for his own former band, the Shit-Kicking Kitty Cats, four happy-go-lucky guys with long hair—heartthrobs. “What up, sweetheart?” he asked Jewel, showing his hands to the woman. “She wants to see Mom.” “She could see Mom at her office.” “You don’t have to talk about me in the third person,” the woman said. “I already saw Mom in her office, and this is what happened after that. Bitch.” “I’m sorry, but that knife is making me scared,” Jewel said. “I wish you would put it away. I wish she would put it away,” she added, turning to Zachary. “I agree,” he said. He’d crossed his arms over his T-shirt. “We come in peace,” he added. “Hey, is that my knife?” “Call her up and get her here,” the woman said. “I’m not waiting till six-fucking-forty-five.” She dropped her bulky bag and, still holding the knife, arranged herself at the head of the table, the place where Claudia usually sat. “You call,” she said to Zachary, and, to Jewel, “You get me a beer.” “You can’t hold yourself to those impossible standards.”Buy the print » Upon receiving the green bottle, the woman raised her heel to the edge of the chair, exposing her bare thigh, her own glance down leading Jewel’s. She was not wearing underpants, Jewel noted, briefly nauseated. “This is the newest,” the woman said. The flesh was white and looked tender, bright-orange stitches surrounding yet another bump, this one the size and shape of a bullet. The tattoo above it was of a pistol, life-size, the silvery metallic hue of a smoldering charcoal briquette, the bullet heading toward her nude crotch. “I’m ambidextrous,” the woman said, as if that explained anything that Jewel wished to have explained. “I wanted to be a doctor, a surgeon, specifically, but they wouldn’t let me stay in med school, the bastards.” Abruptly, she locked her legs together, as if Jewel were snooping. “My I.Q. is a hundred and forty-four. Also, I make all my own clothes. I’m very talented with a needle and thread.” Meanwhile, Zachary stood at the phone spinning his finger impatiently as he listened to Claudia’s lengthy instructions for reaching her, her breathy overenunciation of her name and credentials, the phone tree of co-counsellors, 911, all of it designed to prevent disaster. And yet here sat disaster at the dinner table. Wearing no underwear. “Claud, you should come on home as soon as you get this,” Zachary was saying. “We’re fine, but get here asap, ’K.?” “She’ll check at ten till,” Jewel told the woman. All her life, she’d been aware of the therapeutic clock. “Wonder who she’s making cry now?” the woman replied. Zachary played Kenny’s message, sending Jewel a smile. “He’s pretty persistent, your Gentleman Caller.” The woman said to Jewel, “You know what? I changed my mind. I agree with you—he sounds like a dick. You drink, too,” she commanded Zachary, who didn’t seem upset by the idea. He held up a bottle toward Jewel, offering, a first. The woman’s name was Joy, she told them, expressing no interest in learning their names. To her, they were Claudia’s kid and Claudia’s husband. “Claudia’s the reason I can drink. She took me off those meds. Everybody else thought I was a manic-depressive—a depressed maniac! All the way back to high school—that’s like decades. The only thing every other a-hole could think to do was tranquillize me, turn me into a zombie. Now I can drink. Yay, Dr. Claudia,” she added, holding her beer bottle up, waiting for them to toast with her. “I brought other knives, too,” she added, not wanting them to lose sight of her menace. “I came by last night but all your doors were locked.” Horror swept through Jewel. Her bedroom window had been open, for Magic; all Joy would have had to do was reach in, roll the handle, and then climb right through. Robby had come and gone from his room that way many a time. Jewel had sat at her open window for a long while last night, calling pleadingly for Magic, who’d never stayed away so many days in a row. “He’s old,” her mother had told her, matter-of-factly. “Cats go off to die when they’re old.” Magic’s twin brother, Wizard, Robby’s cat, had been run over by a car early on. Bad luck. Magic was more of a homebody. Jewel couldn’t remember a time without him—he and Wizard had been given to her and Robby as kittens, when they’d had to move so abruptly away from Santa Fe. She wasn’t ready for Magic to go off and die, even if he felt that it was for the best. Her real father had also wanted to go away and die; he’d checked into a hotel to save his wife and small children the mess. Yet he’d missed, and survived. And then paid for the mess. Zachary was agreeing with Joy about Claudia’s fickleness, nodding in the way of the good cop, keeping things chill. “Does she ever become friends with people when they get out of therapy? When they get better? That’s not normal, I get it, but she’s not normal,” Joy said. Zachary looked to Jewel; they both knew that Claudia would never befriend her patients. Be an invested and attentive therapist, yes; take their calls in the middle of the night, rush to their side and embrace them, of course; but invite them over for dinner? Never. Claudia didn’t even socialize with her colleagues at the practice; they were simply grateful that she wished to treat the highly difficult patients she preferred. And every year she attended funerals, plural. Suicides. It was a tragic demographic, borderlines, wobbling on the edge. “I thought she liked me!” Joy said. “I told her everything! And she—” “Her caseload is really heavy,” Zachary said. “I’m sure it wasn’t personal.” “Excuse me,” Joy spat at him. “Are you stupid? It was totally personal. I’m a person! Who trusted another person! Who fucked me over.” And now she was in tears. Finally. “I guess it is personal,” Zachary backpedalled. Jewel could tell that he wanted to rush over and massage Joy’s shoulders, demonstrate his true talents. “But I don’t think Claudia meant to hurt you.” They heard the car door slam. And then they heard another car door slam. “Not cool,” Claudia said to Joy. Her face was icy, furious, her lips two flat lines. With her was a man, nobody Jewel had ever seen before, his gray hair windblown, his eyeglasses repaired with white tape at the bridge, his worn running shoes untied. “This is Lester,” Claudia said. “I’m giving him a ride.” “Dr. Lester,” the man interjected, and held out a slightly trembling hand to Zachary. “Oh, great,” Joy said. “You brought backup. Another person who doesn’t know shit—” “He’s not ‘backup,’ ” Claudia said. “I do not need ‘backup.’ This is unacceptable, Joy. Absolutely unacceptable.” Jewel’s mother was doing three things at once, as usual, removing from the table Jewel’s beer and Joy’s cheese knife, running her hand over the condensation on the wood, and giving Zachary a what-the-fuck glance, as if this situation were of his making, and, as always, she was the one who had to fix everything. “You handed me off to some new chick, somebody who doesn’t know shit. She was reading papers about me, like she was a graduate student or something!” “And the only thing you could think to do was force the issue? Come to my home?” “She has other knives, Mom. In her bag there. Maybe we should call the—” “What do you mean ‘other knives’?” “More than the cheese one!” “That was hers?” she said to Zachary. “Not ours?” He raised his hands in bafflement. “Coming here is one thing, but with weapons? Jesus Christ.” She wiped the table with a dish towel, exasperated but not afraid. Inconvenienced. There would probably be extra paperwork, her least favorite activity. Plus, she was missing yoga. Dr. Lester was taking in the room, rocking on his feet, scanning methodically from ceiling to floor, his hands on his hips, his glasses reflecting the room’s busy contents. “Well, does it look like I’m doing well?” Joy spun on the chair to give Zachary and Claudia a peek at her bullet and gun, perhaps also her lack of underpants. “Huh? How well does that look, to you?” “Joy,” Claudia said, sighing. “Come on. Take a load off, Lester.” She touched his elbow, pausing a moment herself to close her eyes and focus on her breathing. It was a familiar ritual, one she’d suggested to her family time and again when someone was on the verge of overreacting. This was in service of mindfulness, a word that Jewel would be happy never to hear again. “That’s a crazy good gun,” Zachary said, swallowing. “I mean, big ups.” He leaned back to lift his psycho-killer shirt and show Joy his tattoos. Four Lotería cards: scorpion, sun, moon, pierced bloody heart. He lowered his chin to look down at his chest. “I could use a touch-up on the claws and the sun rays.” Claudia clapped her hands and shook the hair out of her eyes. She sat down in Robby’s place, across from Jewel, checking her watch. “Here are your choices,” she began. That was another word Jewel could do without. “I thought you liked me,” Joy said, wiping at her leaking face. “You know me better than anyone else, ever.” The scene reminded Jewel of ones with Robby, her mother calmly reprimanding, her brother guiltily miserable. “Why did you want to hurt my mom?” she asked Joy. “Oh, she won’t hurt anyone but herself,” Claudia said. “Isn’t that right?” “Oh, yeah? What about my first ‘episode’? With my mom?” Joy turned to Jewel. “All of a sudden I was standing over her bed in the middle of the night.” “Joy,” Claudia said, “this is so not appr—” “You’re, what, fourteen?” Joy asked, ignoring Jewel’s mother. “Fifteen? I was fifteen then, holding a butcher knife. I was just so angry. I don’t know what would have happened if she hadn’t woken up. But that’s where it started, me and all the rest of the bullshit. Claudia here keeps telling me I don’t really want to hurt others, but I don’t know. I think maybe I was ready to do something to my mom. I just wanted to . . .” One of her lower eyelids was twitching frenetically. “A cry for help?” Dr. Lester asked. “I mean, isn’t that what it sounds like?” he added deferentially, to Claudia. Jewel realized then that he wasn’t her mother’s colleague, most definitely not “backup,” but another of her patients. Teetering there on his own borderline. “Maybe,” Jewel said, “maybe, like, teach her a lesson?” Joy nodded gratefully. “Exactly.” Claudia gave Jewel a long level look that made her blush and then glance away first, as if there’d been a contest. “I’m sorry,” Zachary said, that one-size-fits-all sentiment. He was in the business of relaxing people, and his voice was part of it. He wasn’t really attending, but Jewel was. For her, it wasn’t so hard to see what Joy was seeing, what she might be recalling, herself as a girl, new to high school, figuring out how many things she didn’t really have a choice about—a process that started with the body, its siege of awful and unseemly eruptions, then kept on, relentlessly, everywhere else, invisible, insidious. And so there might be a nocturnal journey to the knife block and then to her mother’s bedroom. Not difficult at all to imagine a desire to put an end to the onslaught of alarming information about what could not be stopped. “What, you want to be the only girl in history without pubic hair or breasts?” Rhetorical questions—her mother thrived on those. “What do you mean, teach her a lesson?” Claudia asked calmly, still staring at Jewel. Most mothers weren’t like Claudia, so Jewel doubted that Joy’s resembled hers. Nevertheless. Maybe all mothers existed in order to torment their daughters with news of the future. Hadn’t Jewel felt that often enough? And retreated to her room, to hide behind a closed door with her dear old cat? That cat, Magic, who, by the way, came home the day after Joy’s visit, and who, it turned out, wouldn’t go off to hide and die for another few years yet, long after Joy had ceased to be Claudia’s patient. “Poor thing,” Claudia would always say, telling the story. “When she came back to therapy, we had to have a third party present. Talk about awkward.” And she would laugh and roll her eyes. No, Joy was nothing special to Claudia. “Tell me, Jewel,” Claudia went on. “I want to know.” But the lesson wasn’t about taking a knife to her mother’s room. No, the only way to truly hurt her mother, Jewel saw now, was to hurt herself. To turn the blade, for example, a hundred and eighty degrees. Somehow it had become time for Jewel to understand that, too.

She had never perfected the trick of moistening the envelope flap with the tip of her tongue so it would stick and lie perfectly flat. In those days, perfect meant as if untouched by hands. Her flaps were always overwet and lumpy; when she pressed them down, she made them worse. Still, she loved folding the paper twice over, into three equal parts; she loved writing addresses, but especially her name and address in the upper-left corner. J. Seiden. 29 Portnock Road. The dignity, the businesslike efficiency of these slim objects, asking nothing, never disclosing more than they needed to. An envelope with only a check inside flapped like a flag, but an envelope containing a two-page letter had a solid integrity on every plane. A writer only in the sense that she loved having written. She slid the envelopes under the metal lid of the mailbox on her parents’ porch and stared at them for a few moments. Proof of her existence in the world. Proof the world existed. You could count on it: someone was coming to take them away. Proof you would be sent, proof you would arrive. She’s sitting with Quentin at the Caf Café, set up under an enormous beech tree next to the South Royalton charging tower—a collection of salvaged plastic tables and chairs and a wheelbarrow cut up and welded into a wood-burning stove. The café serves mostly sassafras and stinging-nettle tea, but now and again there are red-market goods, unearthed from a collapsed house or a forgotten box in the pantry: half-rotted Lipton bags or dented cans of Bustelo two years past their expiration date. Dorrie, the owner, is a strict no-currency Vore, and you have to know her to get in on the bartering for the really good stuff. But it’s worth biking the seven miles just to bask in the shade of Quentin’s unrepentant optimism. Quentin is a Resurrectionist, a money hoarder. Before that, before the last supplies ran out, he traded unleaded on the red market. He’s the last one left in South Royalton with a working laptop, a silver incongruity whenever he takes it from its case and plugs the white cord into the charging tower’s concatenation of rusting cables. Five minutes of charge keeps the battery alive. People stare at him until he anxiously gathers the laptop up and slips away. Not that anyone would steal it. They just don’t want to be reminded. This isn’t fucking Starbucks, some crusty Vore always mutters. She herself takes a bag of nails everywhere she goes, bound up with fraying rubber bands. Everybody needs nails, and the Rumsons left boxes and boxes of them, sorted by size and type, in the basement. Her basement. Though only in the most accidental sense: it was Nathan who’d found the house, as a caretaker gig on Craigslist. Anyway, Quentin’s saying, I was down at the Grange listening to these guys arguing about the difference between dystopia and apocalypse. Can you believe that? One of them was saying that we were living in a dystopian novel, and the other guy, big bearded dude, from the West Rats Collective, said, No, dystopia means an imaginary place where everything is exactly wrong, and what we’re living in is a postapocalyptic, prelapsarian kind of thing, you know, a return to nature after the collapse of society as we knew it. Want some? He unscrews a Burt’s Bees tin and holds it out to her. Pine sap—milky, resiny, the consistency of caramel. People say it’s almost as good as Nicorette. She shakes her head. He scoops some onto his thumbnail. And I must have been three or four shots in—we were drinking Wayne Peters’s sweet-potato vodka—because I said, Look, kiddos, the truth is neither, because we have no idea what might happen, the infrastructure is still basically in place, especially if people from certain collectives hadn’t stripped out the copper over in White River— No copper, no charging tower, she says. —but my point is really that dystopian and postapocalyptic narratives are narratives, that is, stories: things that are inherently invented or collated ex post facto. Narratives are static. Real life is, is— Kinetic? The point is, we need to just let all that shit go, because, call it End Times or whatever you want, things are different now. None of the old endings played out, did they? So we have to imagine new endings. Hence the possibility for hope. They must have gone easy on you. They just started crying. That’s the sad thing. Haven’t seen so much crying since August of ’15. Some people, you get a little liquor in them and it’s all about the old times. They want to huddle up and sing Lady Gaga. The dark is thickening now. Dorrie clanks her step stool from one low-hanging branch to another, lighting the candles inside each red glass globe. Tomas, the glassblower, held out for almost two years, firing the furnace with the last of his stored L.P.G., then with wood, making thick, indestructible goblets and candle lanterns, heavy and irregular as stones. He’d had exhibits at the Met and the Louvre, had made Christmas ornaments for the White House; now he’s buried under a cairn up on Hull Mountain, dead of spring dysentery. He’s right, she’s thinking, we have no story for ourselves, we’ve outlasted the predictions, we’re too boring to be apocalyptic. But what would hope mean, after all that’s happened? Hope for whom? Quentin’s current theory has something to do with Caspar Weinberger, fallout shelters, server farms, and the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. I’m the town crank, he told her once, swigging from a gallon jug of cider on her porch, his face ribboned with tears. If she didn’t want to spare his feelings she would tell him—the way only one liberal-arts college graduate can say to another—that the problem isn’t just narrative. It’s theory. The era of sense-making itself has passed. We don’t need an analyst, she thinks, or an oracle, God forbid; we need a chronicler, a town recorder, a church Bible full of births and deaths. An inventory with a few highlights, one or two safety tips. A bit of incidental knowledge for whoever comes along next. But who has the hours to sit parked at a desk, smithing words, when there’s ten pounds of berries in buckets on the porch, waiting to be picked over and dried on sheets in the sun? I do. It’s nearly September. Two years E.T., they’ve taken to saying, End Times, as versus B.E.T., Before End Times. Most days the café is empty, Dorrie asleep under a canopy stitched together from banner ads she salvaged from the Catamounts’ baseball field: Petco, Ledyard Bank, Murphy’s Ace Lumber, National Life. Work now or starve in March. But I, she thinks, I’ve hit the jackpot, haven’t I? Only my one mouth to feed, a roof that doesn’t leak, three cords of seasoned wood in the barn, a stone-solid immune system, and hands striated and shiny with scar tissue, hands that can pluck a boiled Mason jar out of a scalding bath. Hands no man would ever love. The charging towers themselves—top-heavy, buttressed with scrap girders, bits of fencing, broken truck axles—hold ten or twelve solar panels each. The larger ones, like Royalton, have a turbine, too. Whirligigs, Quentin says, works of folk art, the last temples, the only evidence they’ll find when we’re gone. Built last summer, the second summer, by a group of restless contractors who’d commandeered the Cumberland Farms and its gas tanks. There was a retired engineer from NBC, Davis something, who’d insisted on welding a radio and a TV antenna to each one. She was there the day they flipped the switch. There was only static, snow, the white-noise waterfall of empty air. People wept. Davis left his equipment to rust where it stood and vanished from town. Died later that summer, people said, eating bad freshwater crabs out of the Winooski. At first there were long lines to charge every conceivable device—battery-powered fans were a big one, of course, PlayStation Portables, dialysis machines (how could anyone survive a year without one?), even vibrators. Twenty minutes a turn, no questions asked. Now the towers sit unused much of the time. Only the diehard and desperate rely on anything electric. There’s a nurse from Woodstock who pedals nearly thirty miles with a homemade charger for hearing-aid batteries. When Dorrie set up the Caf Café, she had a supply of light bulbs and a working refrigerator; a hundred people camped out under the tree every night, holding out for a glass of weak tea with one precious ice cube. There were jugglers, Dobro players, fire eaters, reciters of Shakespeare. Caffeine brought out the best in people. There were plans, speeches, meetings. There was going to be a new society in the ashes of the old. But then August rolled into September: you didn’t need a calendar to smell the change in the air. Wood-gathering season. Nothing like the terror of that first night, when the cold lapped under the blankets like a rising sea. People all went back to their holes, Dorrie said to her. Back to their bathtub whiskey and skunk weed. They remember what last winter was like. We’ll lose another twenty per cent this year, that’s my prediction. It’s the winnowing. She thought of the smell a body has after it’s lain outside all winter, frozen in a block, even the eyes frozen, the vitreous humor turned to marble, and then the spring thaw hits. Lucky it’s only me, then, she said, and I’ve been splitting maple all summer. Oh, honey, Dorrie said. I didn’t mean you. God knows I didn’t mean you. Here is a thing that happened today, she wrote at the top of every page of a kelly-green Kate Spade journal, those first few weeks after the blackout. It had been a twenty-first-birthday gift, too pretty to throw away, though she rarely wrote anything by hand, so it had stayed at the bottom of one closet after another for fifteen years. Once her laptop went dead, she unearthed it and afterward kept it under her shirt at all times, in a special sling made of two “Eat More Kale” T-shirts sewn together. Here is a thing that happened today. It was the only possible way to begin when the last of the cell towers stopped working. Spoke to Mom in California yesterday, she wrote, should have tried again. Russell Tyson had his pickup parked on the town green with three generators running in the back, and people were paying twenty dollars for ten minutes of battery life, coaxing their phones back to a single bar, running fingers through their newly matted hair. A few days later, the gravel around the green was littered with shards of thin, luminous glass: shattered smartphone screens, as disposable now as crack vials had been on North Avenue back in high school. In those dirty days, she thinks, we were all Resurrectionists—even the most dyed-in-the-wool vegan bicyclists still had Tumblrs to update, still needed ice in their fair-trade coffee on an August afternoon, and a monthly refill of Ritalin in a stapled paper bag from the Rite Aid in Norwich. What was it like to spend every moment a little on edge, thinking that any time now the radio would beep, the air-conditioner begin to whir, the lights flood the sullen filthy rooms? What it was like, as a practical matter, was stinky. No one wanting to admit that they needed to go take a bath in the creek. No one wanting to volunteer to build the town latrine. No one who knew how to build a latrine. After the third week, people pissed and shat by the side of the road, in the open. It was Elizabethan. And left little white flags of T.P. everywhere you looked. That was the worst of it: the weeks of withdrawal when the coffee had run out, then the tea, the cigarettes, the Adderall, the Wellbutrin and Ativan, the Paxil and Zoloft. Here is a thing that happened today. She did a tally and counted twenty-three suicides. People disappeared into the woods, carrying knives, plastic bags, rubber bands. Or jumped off the White River Bridge on I-91. It was September, Indian summer, the leaves flaming out, the first nippy nights. The commuters, the office workers, the secretaries and actuaries and lawyers, walked around the town green in a daze, waiting for a sign. The farmers were all hard at work, running out the last diesel in their tractors. Some kids moved into the United Church and hung out a banner: “Occupy Blackout.” There was a girl, she remembers, who went up on the grassy hillside behind the Montessori school with a basket of scraps and a pair of scissors and began re-creating her Pinterest page, squares of bright cloth for each jpeg, strips of blue sheet for the tool bar and browser frame. One night at the beginning of that first winter—it must have been early in December, Nathan out laying the useless snares he’d built from an illustration in “The Homesteader’s Manual”—she panicked when the fire wouldn’t start in the kitchen stove and tore out pages in the journal, two or three at a time, as tinder. The living-room shelves sagged with books she could have used for the same purpose—“The Road Less Traveled,” “Italy on $5 a Day”—but at that moment, she thinks, forgiving herself, no one would have wanted to move a single extra muscle. In the winter, when you’re cold, the world extends no more than a foot in any direction. Anyway, she thinks, no one cares about that stuff. The cheap pathos of children losing their toys. Not about the old dead life: only about the life that took its place. Buy the print » She finds Matilda Barnstone in her rocking chair on the library porch, smoking a pipe, her sawed-off shotgun resting comfortably across the floral sprigs of her lap. The library is the only building left in town with a working lock, chicken wire nailed across the windows. People might share their last finger of motor oil, Matilda says, break a four-inch candle in two, divide a pot of beans to serve eight, but they’ll kill you for a book. She sleeps in the basement with a Glock under her pillow. No lending anymore; all books stay on the premises, which means an old schoolhouse groaning on its joists, two floors, people in every nook, sweating, stinking, swatting flies, licking their thumbs as they page through Maeve Binchy and C. P. Snow, Louis L’Amour and George Santayana. Everyone gets patted down before leaving. Matilda blows out a blue cloud of corn-silk smoke and says, Haven’t seen you here in an age. Still working through the stash at the Rumsons’? Never thought I’d get into Trollope. I’ve read ten so far. Beats Tom Clancy. We take donations, you know. Once I get someone to lend me a horse and some saddlebags. Mmm. Listen, she says, Matilda, there’s a typewriter in the back office, right? Was last I checked. Is there paper for it? Ribbons? Matilda regards her with a faint smile. I’m working on a town history, she says. August of ’15 to the present. A record. There ought to be a record. An oral history. Not quite. Just a record. Written by me. Who’s going to read it? Why, she says, it’ll stay here. In the library. For the next generation. For history. Did I hear right? Did you say the next generation? I never took you for a Resurrectionist. Matilda sits up straight in the chair. There is no history, she says. That’s over now. No writing, only reading. But we have a story, too. We had a story. She rocks vigorously. Now we’re just poor, she says, outside time. Lumpen proletariat. The subaltern. Outside history. And let’s hope history never finds us again. We’ll be squashed like bugs on a windshield. Then a thought seems to strike her. Stay here for a moment, she says. She shoulders the sawed-off and disappears inside. Carter, she hears Matilda bellowing, no pissing out the window, please. Use the latrine. Matilda reappears with a thick padded envelope. Here, she says. Inside there’s a stapled stack of white paper, a manuscript. Shroud of the Hills a novel by Matilda E. Barnstone COPYRIGHT 2003 Sent it to some contests, Matilda says. A few agents, one or two M.F.A. programs. No bites. No notice. Kept getting afraid someone would steal my ideas. Anyway, you can use it. Use it how? Turn it over, dimwit. Use the back. That’s three hundred and thirty-two pages of blank paper. You don’t have another copy? What would I need it for? Leave it in the library and eventually some poor unfortunate soul would read the thing. Got pens? A whole box of ballpoints. Haven’t hardly used them since. Make me look good is all I can say. At home, later, after she’s weeded the tomatoes, harvested the last of the string beans, hauled a load of wash down to the stream and spread it out over the long grass, she sits on the porch with a jar of cold well water and begins: Before the last blackout the power had been on and off for weeks. I came up to Burlington in 2007 after a bad breakup in Brooklyn. It wasn’t until Brian Sterling died, in February of the first winter, that we knew we were doing it wrong. All that paper, glorious and terrifying. She riffles the stack through her fingers. She wonders where her laptop is. Heaped in the back of a closet somewhere, upstairs, with all the other dead things they weren’t able to cannibalize: the surge protectors and headphones, Nathan’s guitar amp, their digital cameras and printers, iPods, iPads, the Rumsons’ Tivoli stereo receiver and Harman Kardon speakers. Before End Times, she’d never written anything on paper longer than a single sheet. Even when she kept a journal her hand cramped up. In college, her writing tutor told her not to think essay, not to think paragraph, just think in thought bubbles like comic strips and type them in big letters, hitting print, print, print every time, then spread them out across the floor and let the essay appear. God, she says out loud, not for the first or the thousandth time, the way we built everything on waste. Now she feels she can’t afford a single wasted sheet. It ought to just come to her. Not because she’s such a genius. No, because she’s the only one, the town scribe, the voice of the people. The living and the dead. For the first few months, before November came and the snow started, you’d still have people rumbling into town in cars, pickups, motorcycles—especially motorcycles, because a gallon of gas went so much farther that way. One of the occupiers would climb up and clang the church bell with a hammer, bringing people running from every direction, skidding their bikes, banging strollers along the rutted sidewalks. Mic check would come the cry, and then the waves of news in little sentence bundles, tweets amplified in waves through the crowd. Manhattan is almost empty there are rats running down Broadway I’m just on my way to look for my kid in Burlington her name’s Shelby just started at U.V.M. don’t know what it’s like up there Police station torched in Hartford; all the riot gear was stolen The Chinese are still flying planes into J.F.K. Cholera outside Boston, must have been in the water, all southern suburbs, hundreds dead in Belmont, Watertown FEMA set up all these orange tents in Springfield then disappeared In Albany there’s a warehouse full of Wonder bread, ration cards being issued I’ve got three bottles of iodine here, one drop for a gallon of water should be enough Met a guy in Portsmouth who had a basement full of batteries for his radio—said he could get only one station, and it was just the same crazy announcer every day, jabbering about a coup Look out for a woman with a beetle tattooed on her wrist I’m a doctor if you have spare antibiotics anything empty your medicine cabinets It was all so random, you might hear five tendrils of the same rumor in a week, each cancelling out the last, and it was almost a relief when the cars and motorcycles stopped coming. People who lived out near the highway still reported seeing vehicles flashing by every now and again, but it was one a day, at most. There was talk of throwing up a checkpoint, a barrier, of collecting tax in some form, but once December started no one had time to think about it. All you heard was the smack of axe on wood. What did people do, she thought, in the places where the old houses had been torn down, where the split-level ranches had baseboard heat and there wasn’t a woodstove to be hauled in fifty miles? Thank God for Vermont and its fucking quote rustic unquote charm, Nathan used to say. Every house had a chimney, some two. Families moved in together that winter; couples learned to grapple in a twin bed or a single sleeping bag. She and Nathan piled up all the comforters in the house, every Boba Fett blanket from the Rumsons’ kids’ rooms, even the decorative handmade quilts from Mississippi that lined the second-floor hallway; it took her breath away, sliding under twenty pounds of thread and batting, but then she curled up against his shoulder blades, letting him take the weight. She’d never been much for spooning before, but it was a month for counting all your advantages. George Larson converted his barn into a smokehouse and slaughtered every alpaca, llama, and goat on his property, excepting the three best milkers and one buck, walking the piles of smoked meat through town in a wheelbarrow, taking anything he could get as barter: family portraits, Rambo knives, bales of cloth diapers, canned peas, stacks of old Rolling Stones. In the spring there were no reports of cars anywhere. She wonders what it would be like to see one again. After nearly two years. A car that moved, not a rusting carapace on blocks. Her own car, a ’99 Subaru, she’d traded to Dwight Yardley; he made it into a spare chicken coop. It was one of those tidbits you picked up in middle-school history: the Middle Ages ended when trade began, when roads were built—or rebuilt, the Roman roads—because merchants carried firsthand accounts from town to town, hamlet to castle. B.E.T., she had never made the connection between movement and the news, between cars and information, but how she’d loved the drive to Brattleboro, back when she was temping at Dryvins Parker three days a week, and the richness of the FM signal that boomed through the car: You’re listening to “All Things Considered.” I’m Robert Siegel. And I’m Michele Norris. In Syria today, government reprisals claimed new victims, but first we’re going to take you to Botswana for a report on new ways to treat waterborne parasites. It was one of the great pleasures of the age, to be safe and warm and dry—showered, deodorized, professionally clothed in espadrilles and a linen jacket, latte steaming up the radio display, taking in the world’s troubles three minutes at a time. That was luxury. Dwight Yardley finds her asleep on the porch the next morning, in the hammock he built for her, the manuscript pages held down by a smooth river stone. Guess that’s why they call it a sleeping porch, he says, setting down the milk crate with a solid clump. Protein, she thinks, swimming out of her dream. Protein has arrived. Didn’t think you’d be here this early. It’s high summer now. Got to be up with the rooster, then sleep through siesta. World doesn’t stop heating up just because we’re unplugged. Hotter every year since I can remember. They’ve had the same conversation a hundred times. Dwight is not imaginative in his ways. Thank God. Eggs this week, he says. Netted some crappie and smoked those. Mushrooms. Threw some more jerky in there, too. Know you’re sick of it, but still. Moose are scarce now, is what he’s saying. And wickedly labor-intensive. She’s never been on one of the group hunts, but Quentin went once, with five other guys. Too big to be hauled away by anything smaller than a pickup, a moose has to be field-butchered, apportioned to the team where it falls. In practice, Quentin says, this means standing around in an inch of blood-soaked snow, like something out of “Fargo,” working frantically to beat nightfall. He sharpened knives all day, that was his task, wiping them against his pants and scrubbing them across the whetstone. For dinner they roasted the heart; it was enough to feed all six of them. Then they hauled the whole bloody mass out, wrapped up and lashed in tarps to the saddles of their horses. It was like Cormac McCarthy, Quentin says, crossed with “The Clan of the Cave Bear.” But you did it, she said, you played your part. Didn’t that make you want to cross over and become a Vore, even for a second? And he said, Are you fucking kidding me? I had nightmares for a week. Eating moose still makes me a little queasy. We’ve advanced since the Pleistocene. That’s the whole point. Your appointment’s this week, she tells Dwight. Want to come inside? Can’t we do it out here? In the hammock? Only if you want to repair it. He grins at her. I was thinking of you leaning over the rail, he says. Got to looking at some of my old magazines. Oh, Dwight. You know I’m shy. No one’s around to see. Being so early, it takes him awhile to get going, she has some massaging and cooing to do, even puts him in her mouth for a minute, but in the end, with her skirt hiked up over her hips, elbows digging into the flaking paint, he’s done before the third grunt. Sorry, he says, pulling up his Carhartts, that’s no way for a gentleman to behave. We can go again if you like, she says, spreading her knees and wiping unashamedly with her bandanna. I didn’t even get out the egg timer. Don’t tease. You know I’m good for one a day, if that. Bet you tell that to all the girls. She wonders how many there really are. The thing about arrangements is everyone has one, but nobody wants to talk about it. That’s what Quentin says. There’s no transparency in informal economies. She remembers what it was like, the transparent world. Walking into a 7-Eleven and looking down the row of coolers, all that glass, all that pure water. Had a vasectomy years back, Dwight said, the first and only time they talked terms, so nothing to worry about on that score. Plus it’s only been me and Angela. How was she to know that she wouldn’t be puking in a month, heavy with another Yardley in the spring? By demanding his medical records? Asking him to go to Rite Aid and get a pack of Trojans? “Are you sure they’re expecting us?”Buy the print » We used to say “oppression” only when we talked about the government. Having to survive is also oppression. Necessity is oppression. Dignity is for people who have options. We were working so hard to get back to the land; then the land got us back and won’t let go. I would give anything to drink coffee out of a Styrofoam cup. Instant coffee with powdered creamer, the kind they gave out for free at car dealerships and funeral homes. I would give anything to throw something away and never see it again. I think about taking out the trash the way we used to at home, rolling it out to the curb, the trucks passing while we were at school. We are our garbage, Mom always used to say, that was her mantra, and I guess she was right in her way. In the first couple of weeks there were big piles of trash outside every house. All the stuff you couldn’t find another use for and couldn’t compost. Yogurt cups, torn trash bags, dirty diapers, hair-spray cans, paper towels. Sometimes you’d see a pile that was as high as your waist. Nathan said it was a purge, a cleanse. But you could just as well say that who we were went out with the empties. We will never get our selves back. In those days all the terms we had were metaphors. A desktop wasn’t a desktop. Mail wasn’t mail. Dial didn’t mean to use a dial. Ringtones didn’t actually ring— In the winter she dreams of forced-air heating, the whoosh of the furnace starting up, the rush through the vents, the toasty smell of radiators, and in the summer she dreams of A.C.: the blast of frigid air in your face when you turned the key in the car, the cool seeping through a new condo with central air and wall-to-wall écru carpets, even the oily dampness of an old window unit in an apartment on Second Avenue with sheets over the windows. And then she thinks: that was the government. That was America. Air-conditioning of the mind. We found that out, didn’t we? Bob Perl, the Royalton postmaster, hung around the town green in an orange FEMA vest for weeks after the first blackout, showing everyone a thick binder labelled “Disaster Response in Rural Communities.” It said that the National Guard would be there within twenty-four hours. There were pictures of tanker trucks, rows of trailers, pallets of M.R.E.s. This isn’t science fiction, Quentin says, because if it were we’d have the answers, we’d know what happened. My parents saved everything I ever wrote, all my school projects, my dioramas, my research reports on alligators and elephants. That was what mattered when I was a kid. Good at art. Good at music. Good at lacrosse. Good at Tae Kwon Do. They had a closet to store all my stuff and then it turned into a separate room, the room that was Nana’s bedroom before she died. Boxes and boxes, labelled “J. Summer Camp Projects 1995.” Of course they kept Peter’s things, too. But I was older; they were obsessive about me. As if they were auditioning me for Jewish sainthood or something. There was this band that everyone listened to in high school, this creepy metal band, and when I got to Holyoke no one had ever heard of them. It must have been some kind of Westchester cult thing. All their songs were about global warming and the end of the world. This band, they were called Into Another, and their stuff was mystical, insane vegan science fiction. Robot whales and ghost pirates and how we human beings are like the dinosaurs, outdated, redundant: grown too large for our environment—I’m not saying it all made sense, but at least they were ahead of their time. They had this one song that ended, “We are the last of the loved ones.” That’s it. We are the last of the loved ones. Professor Fuller used to say that romantic love was an invention of the Renaissance because it takes so many resources and so much leisure time. Adolescence itself was basically invented by the Rand Corporation for marketing purposes in the early fifties. They could afford to love me because Dad worked in Hartford screwing widows out of their husbands’ life insurance. Because Grandpa Stein got the government to declare eminent domain on the Norimco Plant before the E.P.A. designated it a Superfund site. Peter laid it out for me the night he graduated from law school. We’re a family of gangsters, he said. I mean, it’s great that Mom got Tarrytown to do municipal compost, and it’s awesome that you’re doing whatever you do up there, but just so you understand: they did a lot of dirty deeds so you could be pretend poor. Isn’t that what people call it now? Vermont is like Cuba, a little socialist island saved by huge infusions of cash from abroad. It hasn’t occurred to her to worry about Peter until now. A snapping turtle of a human being, a ridiculer, a fortress builder, with his Land Rover, his fancy skis, his JDate profile, his condo in McLean. She visited him there only once: an empty fridge, an elliptical machine facing a TV the size of a small barn, “Shark Week” playing endlessly on mute. The only certifiable yuppies in Royalton, the summer people, had stayed down in their houses on the far side of McIntosh Pond for months, until someone went down to check on them after the first frost and found them all starving, barricaded in their houses, convinced the townspeople were cannibalizing one another. No, she decides, he must be dead. Dead for ages. Huddled by the door, still clasping his sand wedge, waiting for the lights to come back on. Give me a break, she wants to say, rolling out of the hammock on an airless afternoon. The clanging of the church bell rolls across the silent valley in waves: it’s something out of “The Sound of Music,” something Bashō would have written a haiku about. There hasn’t been a peep from the churchers since last year. She thought they’d left town. Too difficult to heat the place, for starters. But someone is up in that belfry banging away. It could be a fire. That’s her best guess. Or a new outbreak. Not news. She’s stopped thinking about news. There’s already a group gathered at the charging station. People tethering horses on the green, toting babies on hips up Division Street. There’s a stranger, a new arrival; someone’s found him a crate to stand on and rolled him a cone out of poster board. He’s freshly bandaged, arm in a sling, his straggling gray hair held back by one of Dorrie’s scrunchies. I was working in corporate headquarters in Norwalk, he’s calling out. Chief Sustainability Officer. Still have my business card here if you want to see it. Case you think I’m some nutcase. My kids were Wilson, Mackenzie, and Dylan. I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m not crazy. Listen to what I have to say, people. We’re listening, someone calls out. Got nowhere else to be. You’ve got a good thing going here, he says, looking around at the crowd. I heard as much. I heard there were places up in the mountains where people didn’t completely lose their shit. Not to say that we were such a total mess. Norwalk did relatively well, actually, for the first year and a half. It turns out the Salvadorean Mafia is really good at running a city with no centralized authority. They took over the Walmarts and the supermarkets. They enforced things. But supplies finally ran out, down to the last Lunchable, seriously. I was trying to learn to track the deer in our subdivision, but all I had was my grandfather’s service revolver. No dice. Our neighbors got one that was roadkill just over the wall on 95. We grilled it on my bench-press rack, tried to get the whole thing evenly well done. Then everybody got sick. Dylan went first. Lauren next. Wilson and Mackenzie— His face swells up, a rictus of old grief. I hit the road, he said, no reason to stay. Figured I’d come up here and see if I could find some kind of community. I made it as far as Springfield. Springfield was a mess. Big piles of trash everywhere and roadblocks of old sofas every few blocks. Came across a natural-foods store, still boarded up and mostly intact. I took some Kashi and soy-nut butter and went back up to the highway. And that’s when I saw it. The convoy. Good one, she thinks, nice timing there. Like a monologue in one of those disaster movies. And then I saw it. The audience leans in. It was this line of Humvees, he says, black Humvees, far as I could see. The bigger boxy ones, troop transports, I guess, and ordinary semis, no markings, no license plates, just white numbers and Q.R. codes on the side. Going north on 91, real slow. So I’m standing there, shading my eyes, getting my bearings, when one of the doors opens and a hand comes out and I hear this voice: Get in. I mean, this convoy, it’s rolling like a slow freight train. I have to run, but I can make it, easily. So there’s two guys up on the front seat, the driver and a guy with a big gun between his knees, like something out of a movie, a rocket launcher, and they both have helmets with face shields on. Can’t see their faces at all. Where are you going? I ask. No answer. Who are you guys, anyway? Keep your head down, the driver says. Stay quiet. We’re not supposed to pick up civilians. It’s half a day before we make it as far as Northampton. Some of the Humvees and trucks peel off there. Then it’s sunset, evening, night, midnight, and we’re still chugging along. No headlights. I’m thinking we must have gotten at least as far as Brattleboro. The guy next to me—rocket-launcher guy? He’s asleep. Or seems to be. Head tipped back, long sighing breaths. We’re going as far as Burlington, the driver says all of a sudden. Securing the major population centers first. Whatever that means up here. Then we cover the countryside. Who are you? I ask him again. The government? Officially we’re Operation Restore Hope. What the hell does that mean? It means in about three months you get to eat French fries again, he says. And take a shit in an actual porta-potty. Six months, you’ll be back to watching “CSI.” But first we need to reëstablish central control. The rule of law. You’d be amazed at some of the crazy catastrophic shit that’s been going on out there. We’ve gotten reports of cannibalism. Pagan rituals. Starvation cults. Hence the heavy machinery. We have to be ready for anything. If you’re the government, what took you so long? Buy the print » Jesus, he says. Civilians. What took us so long? You should be asking, How’d you get here so soon? Have you noticed how radically things go to shit in this country when you turn off the juice for two hours? You ever notice how no one goes to college for electrical engineering anymore? We’ve been doing some serious fly-by-night MacGyver magic just to turn the lights back on in the White Zone. That’s Pennsylvania Avenue to Capitol Hill. It’s all about priorities, rocket-launcher guy says, out of nowhere. Turns out he’s been listening the whole time. Perimeter the strategic areas, he says. I mean, what would you do? Country’s friggin’ dying, man, you have to triage the motherfucker. Airway, breathing, circulation. Get power to the head. Get somebody looking out from behind those eyeballs. So what if they call it the Executive Council now, not the President? Now we get the arteries flowing again. Gas. Bleach. Sugar. TV. Little by little, stepping things up. Start from the trunk and worry about the limbs later. And if the limbs die? Well, which would you rather have, no country or a quadriplegic? They say Vermont’s all easygoing, the driver says. But look what they said about Connecticut. In Bridgeport we were fighting house to house. There aren’t probably three buildings left standing. I mean, I’m from San Diego. What the hell do I know? Enough, rocket-launcher guy says. Don’t scare him. Look, he says to me, we’re letting you out now. Go find some people and spread the word. Remember, it’s called Operation Restore Hope. We’ve got free stickers and water bottles and candy bars, but they’re all up in the front of the convoy. Just remember that name. And tell people, whatever they do, don’t resist, for fuck’s sake. It looks worse than it is. The driver giggles. Resist, he says, and we’ll pulp you like hajjis. What is this feeling, she’s wondering, this creeping numbness, knowing some disaster is happening in some faraway place when you’re standing there doing nothing? Not just ordinary fear: fear of winter, fear of sickness, fear of starving. Dread. That flushed-my-ring-down-the-drain sensation, like you can’t lift your arms. Like Bush in 2000. Wasn’t that where it all began, this feeling that there was a master plan, that maybe the crazies were right after all—the assassination freaks, the Chomskyites, the Y2Kers? Remember that song, back in the nineties? she wants to ask someone. In case she imagined it. The one that goes, We’ll make great pets? Finally I realized the door was still unlocked, the man’s saying, the passenger-side door, and as soon as dawn came up, the first gray in the sky, I opened it and rolled out onto the grass and started running. And here I am. So what’re you telling us? someone calls out. Hide, he says. Go to ground. Be like the Vietnamese. This is a bunch of crap, Dorrie says, but she’s anxious, chomping a stalk of ryegrass and twisting it around her index finger. It’s Psy-Ops. Bet you anything there’s a war party coming up from White River ready to steal our shit while we go hide in the bushes. They’re standing around the Caf, mostly, some collapsed into chairs. A core of twenty or so. Dwight’s there, and Quentin. Matilda sits sunken in a chair, head in hands. Oh Jesus, Quentin says, stop being such a Vore for a minute and admit you might be wrong. This guy’s I.D. says Connecticut. Look, you seriously thought Washington was going to just, like, disappear? He’s trembling, she realizes. Can’t keep his knees in place. His downy calves, his clean socks inside ancient, battered Doc Martens. An indefatigable doer of laundry, with a livid scar that runs the length of one forearm, from the first time he tried skimming the bubbling fat, making soap. There are people who would bear anything, she thinks, to swipe a credit card again, to buy cut flowers, to see the straight furrows in a newly vacuumed carpet. You can’t have everyone mourning quietly on a small farm. Someone has to turn a shining face to the Resurrection, to translate loss into profit. That’s how we got cotton gins, and B-52s, and Tide. Look, Matilda says. One thing we know. Someone’s coming. We haven’t seen the end of this. I’m proposing we arm ourselves and stay together. Who’s with me? Me. Me. Me. Me. She raises her hand, as if to say not I agree but Present. This isn’t the way this story ends, she tells herself, pedalling furiously over the last knobby hill before the Rumsons’ driveway. We’re not like Ewoks, rolling them over with logs, trapezing the soldiers out of their turrets on vines, huddling in tree houses, or like the Cong, trapping them in shit-smeared punji pits, feeding the prisoners to rats. This isn’t “Star Wars” and it isn’t “The Deer Hunter” and it isn’t “Independence Day.” We’ve got no reason to believe this guy. We’ve got crops to bring in, tomatoes getting soft on the vine, and we’re wasting time acting out “Red Dawn.” But she’ll cycle back with the gun, because she knows she doesn’t want to be alone. Mr. Rumson, who seemed like such a nice man, a mild-mannered professor of something, who evidently didn’t believe in sunscreen, the way his nose peeled—she’d met him the one time she picked up the key—he’d left the place well armed, nonetheless. A whole cabinet of guns, unlocked, up in his study, in the attic. She keeps a revolver lying next to her on the bed upstairs and, because Dwight insists, a shotgun in the corner just inside the front door. If a deer comes across the lawn, he says, don’t think twice. Aim for the head. And don’t worry about the butchering; I’ll hear the gun. That’s a year’s supply of meat for one skinny thing like you. The gun she wants now is the scary one, with the folding stock and the banana clip. How does she even know those words? It’s surprisingly light, when she lifts it out by the strap. The clip slides in and locks just like plugging a battery into a camera. Idiot-proof. She writes at the table on the porch, the assault rifle laid out just within reach: Brian was the first person I’d ever seen die, and it was my fault, or at least I contributed. I mean, I didn’t get him sick, but Nathan said not to leave the fire burning so high with the windows closed. I got better at it after that. For a while we served as the hospital, eleven or twelve patients at a time. There was no reason not to, all these big rooms downstairs and a good supply of wood, two stoves. Maxine was an herbalist and a Reiki healer and a P.A., too; she stayed here three months, directing things. That was the best of it. Then she came down with it and Nathan and I were left handling things on our own. Dwight brought food when he could and took the bodies out, but that was before the last blizzard, the March blizzard. After Brian I got impatient with them as they died. Knowing that by the time the lips started turning blue there was no stopping it. Hurry up, I used to think, free up the bed. By the time it was Nathan’s turn I was just sloppy. Forgetting to bring him water for hours. Things like that. I was never cut out to be a nurse. There was snow banked halfway up the downstairs windows. Where was I supposed to put the bodies? I laughed at him. I laughed at Nathan when he begged me for things. He was delusional at the end, begging for Klondike bars. I was never meant to have children I never wanted to. This isn’t our story. There was supposed to be time to tell our story. I was a decent person. I went to good schools. In my own time I would have been a good person. You can’t judge the people on the lifeboats, the crashed soccer players in the stupid Andes. This is the last time a person will be one person what do I mean I mean a woman living in a house alone Dwight offered to have me stay with them the second winter and I said no I’ll cut my own wood no one stays with me this time I’ll stock up properly I’m immune now I guess so this is the last time I don’t know how to write without drafts I don’t know how to write a declarative sentence fuck it I don’t know how to declare anything at all A boil of black smoke rises off the ridge opposite her. The Macneils. What could they have out there—a forgotten oil drum, a pile of tires? Are they fighting already? Is it the Army? The people from White River? A grinding sound, a whining sound. Machinery. Is that what it is? It’s been two years; she can’t be sure. And then, trickling through the air, a sick Morse code, a demented tap dancer: gunshots. This is it, she thinks, not the End Times, the time of the end. What makes her so certain? I have been intimate with death, she thinks, that’s how I know. I can smell it, even on myself. She picks up the manuscript: fifteen pages. Scrawl. Notes. Hesitations. Matilda was right, she says to herself. We’re not the beginning of anything; we’re about to be pulped, right back into the ground. We’re about to reënter history. We were good people. We made it work. We weren’t sad. We were proud. We didn’t need an ending. We were too grateful. Living was enough. A flicker of wind, a sudden gust across the yard, takes the pages out of her hand; she doesn’t even have to toss them. White flags across the garden; perfect rectangles, perfect things, falling lightly on the gravel, resting in the tall grass. That’s done, she says. Picks up the rifle and lays it across her knees.

Travelling to the moon was way less complicated this year than it was back in 1969, as the four of us proved, not that anyone gives a whoop. You see, over cold beers on my patio, with the crescent moon a delicate princess fingernail low in the west, I told Steve Wong that if he threw, say, a hammer with enough muscle, said tool would make a five-hundred-thousand-mile figure eight, sail around that very moon, and return to Earth like a boomerang, and wasn’t that fascinating? Steve Wong works at Home Depot, so has access to many hammers. He offered to chuck a few. His co-worker MDash, who’d shortened his long tribal name to rap-star length, wondered how one would catch a red-hot hammer falling at a thousand miles an hour. Anna, who does something in Web design, said that there’d be nothing to catch, as the hammer would burn up like a meteor, and she was right. Plus, she didn’t buy the simplicity of my cosmic throw-wait-return. She is ever doubtful of my space-program bona fides. She says I’m always “Apollo 13 this” and “Lunokhod that,” and have begun to falsify details in order to sound like an expert, and she is right about that, too. I keep all my nonfiction on a pocket-size Kobo digital reader, so I whipped out a chapter from “No Way, Ivan: Why the CCCP Lost the Race to the Moon,” written by an émigré professor with an axe to grind. According to him, in the mid-sixties the Soviets hoped to trump the Apollo program with just such a figure-eight mission: no orbit, no landing, just photos and crowing rights. The Reds sent off an unmanned Soyuz with, supposedly, a mannequin in a spacesuit, but so many things went south that they didn’t dare try again, not even with a dog. Kaputnik. Anna is as thin and smart as a whip, and driven like no one else I have ever dated (for three exhausting weeks). She saw a challenge here. She wanted to succeed where the Russians had failed. It would be fun. We’d all go, she said, and that was that, but when? I suggested that we schedule liftoff in conjunction with the forty-fifth anniversary of Apollo 11, the most famous space flight in history, but that was a no-go, as Steve Wong had dental work scheduled for the third week of July. How about November, when Apollo 12 landed in the Ocean of Storms, also forty-five years ago but forgotten by 99.999 per cent of the people on Earth? Anna had to be a bridesmaid at her sister’s wedding the week after Halloween, so the best date for the mission turned out to be September 27th, a Saturday. Astronauts in the Apollo era had spent thousands of hours piloting jet planes and earning engineering degrees. They had to practice escaping from launchpad disasters by sliding down long cables to the safety of thickly padded bunkers. They had to know how slide rules worked. We did none of that, though we did test-fly our booster on the Fourth of July, out of Steve Wong’s huge driveway in Oxnard, hoping that, with all the fireworks, our unmanned first stage would blow through the night sky unnoticed. Mission accomplished. That rocket cleared Baja and is right now zipping around the Earth every ninety minutes and, let me state clearly, for the sake of multiple government agencies, will probably burn up harmlessly on reëntry in twelve to fourteen months. MDash, who was born in a sub-Saharan village, has a super brain. In junior high, with minimal English skills, he won a science-fair Award of Merit with an experiment on ablative materials, which caught fire, to the delight of everyone. Since having a working heat shield is implied in the phrase “returning safely to Earth,” MDash was in charge of that and all things pyrotechnic, including the explosive bolts for stage separation. Anna did the math, all the load-lift ratios, orbital mechanics, fuel mixtures, and formulas—the stuff I pretend to know, but which actually leaves me in a fog. My contribution was the Command Module—a cramped, headlight-shaped spheroid that was cobbled together by a very rich pool-supply magnate, who was hell-bent on getting into the private aerospace business to make him some big-time NASA cash. He died in his sleep just before his ninety-fourth birthday, and his (fourth) wife/widow agreed to sell me the capsule for a hundred bucks, provided I got it out of the garage by the weekend. I named the capsule the Alan Bean, in honor of the lunar-module pilot of Apollo 12, the fourth man to walk on the moon and the only one I ever met, in a Houston-area Mexican restaurant, in 1986. He was paying the cashier, as anonymous as a balding orthopedist, when I yelled out, “Holy cow! You’re Al Bean!” He gave me his autograph and drew a tiny astronaut above his name. Since four of us would be a-comin’ round the moon, I needed to make room inside the Alan Bean and eliminate pounds. We’d have no Mission Control to boss us around, so I ripped out all the Comm. I replaced every bolt, screw, hinge, clip, and connector with duct tape (three bucks a roll at Home Depot). Our privy was a shower curtain, for privacy. I’ve heard from an experienced source that a trip to the john in zero gravity requires that you strip naked and give yourself half an hour, so, yeah, privacy was key. I replaced the outer-opening hatch and its bulky lock-EVAC apparatus with a steel-alloy plug that had a big window and a self-sealing bib. In the vacuum of space, the air pressure inside the Alan Bean would force the hatch closed and airtight. Simple physics. Announce that you are flying to the moon and everyone assumes you mean to land on it—to plant the flag, kangaroo-hop in one-sixth gravity, and collect rocks to bring home, none of which we were going to do. We were flying around the moon. Landing is a whole different ballgame, and as for stepping out onto the surface? Hell, choosing which of the four of us would get out first and become the thirteenth person to leave boot-prints up there would have led to so much bad blood that our crew would have broken up long before T minus ten seconds and counting. Assembling the three stages of the good ship Alan Bean took two days. We packed granola bars and water in squeeze-top bottles, then pumped in the liquid oxygen for the two booster stages and the hypergolic chemicals for the one-shot firing of the translunar motor, the mini-rocket that would fling us to our lunar rendezvous. Most of Oxnard came around to Steve Wong’s driveway to ogle the Alan Bean, not a one of them knowing who Alan Bean was or why we’d named the rocket ship after him. The kids begged for peeks inside the spacecraft, but we didn’t have the insurance. What are you waiting for? You gonna blast off soon? To every knothead who would listen, I explained launch windows and trajectories, showing them on my MoonFaze app (free) how we had to intersect the moon’s orbit at exactly the right moment or lunar gravity would . . . Ah, hell! There’s the moon! Point your rocket at it and put on a show! Twenty-four seconds after clearing the tower, our first stage was burning all stops, and the Max-Q app ($0.99) showed us pulling 11.8 times our weight at sea level, not that we needed iPhones to tell us this. We . . . were . . . fighting . . . for breath . . . with Anna . . . screaming . . . “Get off . . . my chest!” But no one was on her chest. She was, in fact, sitting on me, crushing me like a lap dance from an offensive lineman. Kaboom went MDash’s dynamite bolts, and the second stage fired, as programmed. A minute later, dust, loose change, and a couple of ballpoint pens floated up from behind our seats, signalling, Hey! We’d achieved orbit! Weightlessness is as much fun as you can imagine, but troublesome for some spacegoers, who for no apparent reason spend their first hours up there upchucking, as if they’d overdone it at the pre-launch reception. It’s one of those facts never made public by NASA P.R. or in astronaut memoirs. After three revolutions of the Earth, as we finished running the checklist for our translunar injection Steve Wong’s tummy finally settled down. Somewhere over Africa, we opened the valves in the translunar motor, the hypergolics worked their chemical magic, and—voosh—we were hauling the mail to Moonberry R.F.D., our escape velocity a crisp seven miles per second, Earth getting smaller and smaller in the window. The Americans who went to the moon before us had computers so primitive that they couldn’t get e-mail or use Google to settle arguments. The iPads we took had something like seventy billion times the capacity of those Apollo-era dial-ups and were mucho handy, especially during all the downtime on our long haul. MDash used his to watch Season Four of “Breaking Bad.” We took hundreds of selfies with the Earth in the window and, plinking a Ping-Pong ball off the center seat, played a tableless table-tennis tournament, which was won by Anna. I worked the attitude jets in pulse mode, yawing and pitching the Alan Bean for views of some of the few stars that were visible in the naked sunlight: Antares, Nunki, the globular cluster NGC 6333—none of which twinkle when you’re up there among ’em. The big event of translunar space is crossing the equigravisphere, a boundary as invisible as the International Date Line but, for the Alan Bean, the Rubicon. On this side of the EQS, Earth’s gravity was tugging us back, slowing our progress, bidding us to return home to the life-affirming benefits of water, atmosphere, and a magnetic field. Once we crossed, the moon grabbed hold, wrapping us in her ancient silvery embrace, whispering to us to hurry hurry hurry to wink in wonder at her magnificent desolation. At the exact moment that we reached the threshold, Anna awarded us origami cranes, made out of aluminum foil, which we taped onto our shirts like pilot’s wings. I put the Alan Bean into a Passive Thermal Control BBQ roll, our moon-bound ship rotating on an invisible spit so as to distribute the solar heat. Then we dimmed the lights, taped a sweatshirt over the window to keep the sunlight from sweeping across the cabin, and slept, each of us curled up in a comfortable nook of our little rocket ship. When I tell people that I’ve seen the far side of the moon, they often say, “You mean the dark side,” as though I’d fallen under the spell of Darth Vader or Pink Floyd. In fact, both sides of the moon get the same amount of sunshine, just on different shifts. Because the moon was waxing gibbous to the folks back home, we had to wait out the shadowed portion on the other side. In that darkness, with no sunlight and the moon blocking the Earth’s reflection, I pulsed the Alan Bean around so that our window faced outbound for a view of the Infinite Time-Space Continuum that was worthy of IMAX: unblinking stars in subtle hues of red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet, our galaxy stretching as far as our eyes were wide, a diamond-blue carpet against a black that would have been terrifying had it not been so mesmerizing. Then there was light, snapping on as if MDash had flipped a switch. I tweaked the controls, and there below us was the surface of the moon. Wow. Gorgeous in a way that strained any use of the word, a rugged place that produced oohs and awe. The LunaTicket app ($.99) showed us traversing south to north, but we were mentally lost in space, the surface as chaotic as a windblown, gray-capped bay, until I matched the Poincaré impact basin with the “This Is Our Moon” guide on my Kobo. The Alan Bean was soaring a hundred and fifty-three kilometres high (95.06 miles Americanus), at a speed faster than that of a bullet from a gun, and the moon was slipping by so fast that we were running out of far side. Oresme crater had white, finger-painted streaks. Heaviside showed rills and depressions, like river washouts. We split Dufay right in half, a flyover from its six to its twelve, the rim a steep, sharp razor. Mare Moscoviense was far to port, a mini-version of the Ocean of Storms, where four and a half decades ago the real Alan Bean spent two days, hiking, collecting rocks, taking photos. Lucky man. Our brains could take in only so much, so our iPhones did the recording, and I stopped calling out the sights, though I did recognize Campbell and D’Alembert, large craters linked by the smaller Slipher, just as we were about to head home over the moon’s north pole. Steve Wong had cued up a certain musical track for what would be Earthrise but had to reboot the Bluetooth on Anna’s Jambox and was nearly late for his cue. MDash yelled, “Hit Play, hit Play!” just as a blue-and-white patch of life—a slice of all that we have made of ourselves, all that we have ever been—pierced the black cosmos above the sawtooth horizon. I was expecting something classical, Franz Joseph Haydn or George Harrison, but “The Circle of Life,” from “The Lion King,” scored our home planet’s rise over the plaster-of-Paris moon. Really? A Disney show tune? But, you know, that rhythm and that chorus and the double meaning of the lyrics caught me right in the throat, and I choked up. Tears popped off my face and joined the others’ tears, which were floating around the Alan Bean. Anna gave me a hug like I was still her boyfriend. We cried. We all cried. You’d have done the same. Coasting home was one fat anticlimax, despite the (never spoken) possibility of our burning up on reëntry like an obsolete spy satellite circa 1962. Of course, we were all chuffed, as the English say, that we’d made the trek and maxed out the memory on our iPhones with iPhotos. But questions arose about what we were going to do upon our return, apart from making some bitchin’ posts on Instagram. If I ever run into Al Bean again, I’ll ask him what life has been like for him since he twice crossed the equigravisphere. Does he suffer melancholia on a quiet afternoon, as the world spins on automatic? Will I occasionally get the blues, because nothing holds a wonder equal to splitting Dufay down the middle? T.B.D., I suppose. “Whoa! Kamchatka!” Anna called out as our heat shield expired into millions of grain-size comets. We were arcing down over the Arctic Circle, gravity once again commanding that we who went up must come down. When the chute pyros shot off, the Alan Bean jolted our bones, causing the Jambox to lose its duct-tape purchase and conk MDash in the forehead. By the time we splashed down off Oahu, a trail of blood was running from the ugly gash between his eyebrows. Anna tossed him her bandanna, because guess what no one had thought to take around the moon? To anyone reading this with plans to imitate us: Band-Aids. At Stable One—that is, bobbing in the ocean, rather than having disintegrated into plasma—MDash tripped the “Rescue us!” flares that he’d rigged under the Parachute Jettison System. I opened the pressure-equalizing valve a tad early, and—oops—noxious fumes from the excess-fuel burnoff were sucked into the capsule, making us even queasier, what with the mal de mer. Once the cabin pressure was at the same p.s.i. as outside, Steve Wong was able to uncork the main hatch, and the Pacific Ocean breeze whooshed in, as soft as a kiss from Mother Earth, but, owing to what turned out to be a huge design flaw, that same Pacific Ocean began to join us in our spent little craft. The Alan Bean’s second historic voyage was going to be to Davy Jones’s locker. Anna, thinking fast, held aloft our Apple products, but Steve Wong lost his Samsung (the Galaxy! Ha!), which disappeared into the lower equipment bay as the rising seawater bade us exit. The day boat from the Kahala Hilton, filled with curious snorkelers, pulled us out of the water, the English speakers on board telling us that we smelled horrid, the foreigners giving us a wide berth. After a shower and a change of clothes, I was ladling fruit salad from a decorative dugout canoe at the hotel buffet table when a lady asked me if I had been in that thing that came down out of the sky. Yes, I told her, I had gone all the way to the moon and returned safely to the surly bonds of Earth. Just like Alan Bean. “Who?” she said.

Last night Crystal dreamed she was sitting naked on the corduroy rectory couch next to Father Paul, who was snipping at her fingers with orange-handled scissors. In the dream she was holding a prayer card on which was printed, in place of a saint, a still from her sonogram. She felt stinging cuts on her knuckles and in the webbing between her fingers, saw the warm blood running down her wrists and beading on the laminated surface of the card, but she neither cried for help nor tried to get away; she was pinned to the couch by her pregnant belly. If the dream hadn’t been so unsettling it might have been almost comical, Crystal thought now, Monday morning, as she updated the calendar of events for Our Lady of Seven Sorrows: Father Paul, so benign and solicitous and eager for approval in waking life, starring as the villain in her dream. She glanced down at her fingers typing, intact. If she told Father Paul about her dream—though she wouldn’t tell him anything about her life ever again—he’d be concerned and apologetic, as if it weren’t Crystal’s own warped brain that had cast him in the scene. Even the thought of his concern irritated her. Any minute, Father Paul would walk into the office, and when he did she’d smile as if everything were just fine, as if their conversation on Friday had never happened. Impressive, how efficiently her subconscious tallied, dismantled, and blended together her sins, molding them all into a tidy and disturbing little narrative as persistent and irksome as pine sap. First, on Friday, she’d been rude to Father Paul. Then, on Saturday, she’d gone to a party at a condo in a new development west of town with friends from Santa Fe High and had spent the evening sipping from other people’s drinks. That was bad enough. But she’d also left with someone, a friend of a friend, ridden back to his apartment in his truck, knowing full well that he was drunk but not feeling an ounce of concern for the babies or for herself. “I’ve never fucked a pregnant girl,” the guy had said softly, watching from the bed in his filthy bedroom as she pulled down her maternity jeans. He’d been cautious and attentive, and for as long as it lasted Crystal had felt deeply sexy and, for the first time in seven months, unburdened. Only at dawn, once she’d slipped out into the chill and was waiting for a cab on an unfamiliar street in a tired, trucks-on-blocks kind of neighborhood, did it occur to her to worry about the babies, that they’d been squished or knocked about, polluted by his fluids. And Crystal might have been murdered—strangled, shot, beaten beyond recognition. Wasn’t murder the leading cause of death for pregnant women? With a pang of dismay, she thought of her last checkup. She’d been given a 3-D ultrasound, the latest in prenatal imaging, the technician told her, which they were offering free because they were still training on the machine. The images were terrifying and unreal: boy and girl, fists and ears and pursed lips, bent legs stringy with tendons, alien eyes swollen shut. Everything looked yellow and cold and shiny, as if dipped in wax. “Say hello to your cuties,” the technician had said, and Crystal had watched in silence as they pulsed on the screen. But today the babies seemed great, kicking up a storm, and she hadn’t been murdered. Saturday had been nothing more than a last hurrah, Crystal reminded herself, a harmless attempt to pretend that her life was still her own, whatever Father Paul or her mother might say. Looked at another way, the dream was even reassuring: at least Crystal felt guilt. At least she might think twice next time. Yes, everything was fine, and it was even nice to be back at work, away from her weekend and her nightmare, in the close clutter of the parish office, where the day was predictable, the tasks manageable—where, in theory at any rate, earnest, hopeful work was taking place all around her. Meanwhile, the real Father Paul was late yet again, this time for his eight-o’clock premarital-counselling appointment. A young couple sat on the couch facing Collette’s desk. The man plucked at one of his sideburns with sullen impatience; the girl sat upright and glanced nervously at him. Every few minutes, Collette looked up from folding the weekly bulletins and glared at them. From her desk in the corner, Crystal sipped her Diet Coke and watched. Collette’s bad temper was democratic in its reach and, when it wasn’t directed at Crystal, could be very entertaining. Once, when they were alone in the office, Collette had startled her by pausing at her desk and saying, darkly, that Crystal was an example to young women, choosing life. For a moment Crystal had seen herself as Collette might: a tragic figure, a fallen woman, but, when it came down to it, contrite and virtuous, taking responsibility for her mistake. But then Collette had elaborated: “If girls are going to run around like that, they should pay.” The young man opened his cell phone, then snapped it shut. “Eight-fifty-seven,” he said. “Jesus. I got work to do.” “He’ll be here,” the girl said. She looked at Crystal and gave her a miserable, apologetic smile. She’d dressed for the appointment: black pants tight around the thighs, shirt made of a cheap stretchy satin. Her hair was down, sprayed into crispy waves around her face. A gold cross hung from her neck. Crystal imagined she’d dug it out so that Father Paul would think she was a virgin, which was what Crystal herself had done when she took the job, two years ago. Since the arrival of Father Leon, the young Nigerian priest, three months before, Father Paul had been sleeping past his alarm. Crystal enjoyed the thought of the priests chattering away late into the night like girls at a sleepover—but the idea of humorless, aloof Father Leon saying anything that wasn’t strictly necessary defied imagination. Sometimes, to amuse herself, Crystal experimented by greeting him with wide-ranging degrees of enthusiasm, but Father Leon gave her the same solemn nod every time. More likely, Father Paul stayed up late reading. In the afternoons Crystal cleaned the rectory, and Father Paul’s study, with its crowded, dusty shelves and uneven stacks of books, was the most difficult of her jobs. Or it would have been, if she’d ever done it properly. Usually she swiped her paper towel along the edge of the shelves and vacuumed around the papers and wool cardigans and scattered shoes and books. Church histories, Pacific naval battles, C.I.A. conspiracies. If she mentioned his books—how many he had or how busy they must keep him—Father Paul generally cracked some mild self-deprecating joke and changed the subject to television, as if out of consideration for Crystal. He loved crime shows, the same ones Crystal occasionally watched at night, in which naked young women showed up dead in hotel bathrooms. “My guilty pleasure,” Father Paul said, shrugging good-naturedly. Crystal didn’t like thinking about a priest’s guilty pleasures. But, actually, she couldn’t see Father Paul being truly guilty of anything. Even the crime shows were part of an act, she suspected, to prove that he was a little naughty. Human. During Lent he’d made a big show of sneaking handfuls of M&M’s from the glass bowl on Collette’s desk, the woman’s one concession to office niceties. “Oh, you know me,” Father Paul would say, jiggling the candy in his palm before tossing back a mouthful, and Crystal would smile gamely. “Half of me loves being a pirate, and half of me regrets it.”Buy the print » “Guess he has to have something,” Collette said once after Father Paul left. “These alcoholics never get any better, just switch one thing for another. He better watch it.” Crystal had rolled her eyes. Twenty-eight years clean, Father Paul had announced last month, on his anniversary, and his air of celebration had seemed just as overblown as Collette’s cynicism. Father Paul would, as always, feel terrible about being late for the couple’s appointment. He’d take off his glasses and press his thumbs into his eyes, and his lapse would probably show up in his homily, as his lapses always did. His sins were so vanilla that you almost had to wonder whether he committed them just to have something to talk about on Sundays. Even his alcoholism and his journey to recovery had been wrung of any possible drama by how thoroughly and publicly he had examined them. In the next several days he’d repeatedly bring up this morning’s tardiness, and Crystal would have to tell him each time that it was an honest mistake, that everyone makes mistakes. The young man bounced his leg, and the heavy heel of his work boot thumped. Finally, he stood. He planted his fists on the cluttered edge of Collette’s desk and leaned in. “I’m not waiting around all day.” His fiancée widened her eyes. But, if he meant to intimidate, he’d picked the wrong person. Collette had worked in the parish office for years. Her tasks were menial and few, but she sat at her desk all day like a toad, grumbling in Spanish as she opened offertory envelopes and pasted labels. Though her desk was closest to the door, she did not greet people when they came in. If spoken to, she sighed, set down whatever she was working on, and looked so put-upon that, more often than not, people made hasty apologies and turned to Crystal for what they needed. Collette jerked her porous, wrinkled chin at the young man. “You got things to do? So get away with you, then.” When he looked at her in surprise, Collette held his gaze. “I mean it. Get out. We don’t want you here.” The man stepped back, glanced uncertainly at the door, then at Crystal. “Please,” the girl said, eyes filling, voice tragic. “We have to meet Father Paul. We’re not even done with the premarital questionnaire. The wedding’s on Saturday!” Collette turned to Crystal. “Go find him.” Crystal fixed her eyes on the screen and clattered away at the keyboard. “Actually, I’m in the middle of something.” “And if he’s not there bring that Father Leon.” Collette snorted, as she always did when mentioning the new priest. The girl’s face registered dismay, because Father Paul was beloved and Father Leon was not, but what could you do? A priest was a priest, even if he was just a pastoral vicar newly arrived from Africa, and you had to act grateful. Now Collette said, “It’ll do that man good to socialize him. You hear me, Crystal? Go on.” Crystal pushed herself up from her desk, tugging her shirt over her belly. “Fine.” The job was supposed to have been temporary, a pause before college, but here she still was, needing the money more than ever. When Crystal first started showing, she worried that she might have to leave, but to her relief her pregnancy had elicited surprisingly positive reactions, Collette notwithstanding. The ladies in the Altar Society had given her an array of miniature garments in pink and blue. Her mother, usually so needy and resentful, was pleased that Crystal had given up her apartment and moved back home. She talked incessantly about the babies, prepared plates of protein- and calcium-rich foods, loudly beseeched God to keep them healthy. Crystal was grateful—she was—but still hated that her mother had to be involved. “Where were you, staying out all hours?” her mother asked when Crystal got home Sunday morning. “You know better. And me home alone waiting.” But no one was as sympathetic as Father Paul. Perhaps because she was young and pregnant or because she cleaned the rectory, he was always reaching out, thanking Crystal for her hard work, taking an interest. “Anytime you need an ear or a hand,” he’d say as she Windexed the patio doors. He seemed eager for her good opinion, seemed to want her to confide in him. Once, she had admitted that the babies’ father was out of the picture, though she hadn’t revealed how little she’d known him—another hookup, another party. “I’m so sorry,” Father Paul had said, his eyes soft and his voice rich with empathy. Then, after a moment, “You know, the sacrament of Reconciliation is such a gift.” When Father Leon’s arrival was announced, Crystal had expected someone energetic and progressive and possibly tiresome, setting up basketball games and youth activities and regular soup kitchens in the hall. She’d thought that the new priest might joke with her, might offer real comfort that came from his contemporary understanding of how the world actually worked. Instead of invigorating the parish, though, Father Leon’s arrival had strained its atmosphere. “Would you believe he told me to type up his homily?” Collette had hissed, thrusting a legal pad into Father Paul’s chest. “Who does he think he is?” “I’ll talk to him,” Father Paul had promised, but the same day he’d drawn Crystal aside and asked her to type it. “Please. As a favor to me.” So, ever since, it had fallen to her to decipher Father Leon’s slanted, feminine cursive. Each time Crystal handed Father Leon the printed pages, dense with abstractions and Biblical quotations, he murmured a wooden thank-you without looking at her, already scanning his words. Rather than sticking to love and brotherhood and the primacy of conscience, Father Leon went right for the hot-button issues, criticizing the permissiveness of American society. “Tolerance of sin is not a Christian virtue, and homosexuality is a sin, full stop,” Father Leon had told the congregation during an early weekday Mass. “Even in this house of God, I can smell the stink of Satan. He has found purchase in the hearts of some gathered here today.” Crystal pictured him scowling down from the pulpit, in his cassock looking like an unpleasant child forced to play dress-up. There had been very few people present, but one of them was the president of the Altar Society, whose fourteen-year-old grandson was gay. She’d stormed into the office in a rage. “The stink of Satan? Shame on him,” she told Father Paul. “God forgive me, but that man doesn’t belong here.” “He’s young, he’s full of ideas. He’s getting his sea legs,” Father Paul had said, looking fretful. “We’re lucky to have him, with so few young men entering the priesthood.” Father Paul had begun to show signs of tension: the oversleeping, for one. He also seemed to have amped up his benevolence, as if to make up for Father Leon’s coldness. While Father Leon stayed shut away in his study, Father Paul always seemed to be lying in wait for Crystal when she came to clean, ready with a smile or a kind word. He was lonely, maybe, Crystal thought, or maybe, with Father Leon chipping in, he just had less to do. Over and over he offered her help, over and over he brought up Reconciliation, as if he had an urgent personal stake in her salvation. “Still not funny. Try jamming yourselves all together into the car.”Buy the print » So, after months of putting it off, she’d gone to confession. But there, in the dark confessional, something had happened: Crystal had actually felt bad about not having been a virgin since she was sixteen, had almost believed that sex wasn’t completely ordinary. The sudden sense of her own remorse had made her words waver, and she was overcome by the vastness of her insult to God. She had believed truly, as she never had before, that Father Paul—this man whose dishes she washed and laundry she folded, who left drops of urine on the toilet seat—could deliver her apology to God. She’d caught her breath and felt tears burn her eyes, until, from the other side of the screen, Father Paul had dropped into his most soothing voice. “We can hate the sin but love the sinner.” Crystal must have been seeking punishment, humiliation, shame. She must have been trying to hold tight to her guilt or to shock him out of his infuriating tenderness, because what else could explain what came out of her mouth next? “But, Father, it wasn’t just regular sex. He went in behind, too.” There was a long, terrible silence. Beyond the confessional, the empty church breathed and creaked. Outside, a motorcycle roared past. Crystal gripped one hand with the other. Finally she heard the unsticking of lips and Father Paul said, “Consider this a new chance, and ask God to help you be the mother your babies deserve.” Confession was confidential, of course, and Father Paul gave no sign that he knew who had been on the other side of the screen—and, who knows, maybe he didn’t, though he’d have to be a fool not to—but Crystal couldn’t stand to be around him for weeks afterward. She felt ambushed and stupid. In the office, she kept her head behind the computer monitor when he passed through. Most afternoons Father Paul had appointments, so she cleaned the rectory when he was out. Really, it was a miracle that she’d managed to avoid him for as long as she had. But on Friday, as she was putting the rags and detergents under the sink, Father Paul had come into the freshly mopped kitchen. He’d leaned against the counter and watched her. “You must miss the father,” he’d said, and Crystal had had to sink back on her heels and nod politely. Father Paul furrowed his brow and the creases went all the way up his bald red head. “Even if it wasn’t the right partnership, it must pain you to be embarking on this alone. But we’re here for you.” His voice was insistent. “The parish will stand by you and your children.” Father Paul paused. He seemed to be thinking something over, and, with a sense of vertigo, Crystal imagined him imagining her in the throes of all sorts of mortifying, sweaty exertions. Then he crossed the damp linoleum—leaving dull footprints—and dug in his pocket. He presented her with a laminated prayer card of the Santo Niño de Atocha. “I’ve been wanting to give you this.” Crystal turned the card in her hand, flushing. The Santo Niño: Christ Child with long dress and pilgrim’s staff, dark curls tucked under wide-brimmed hat, walking under the stars across mesas and winding among piñon. He walked so far and so long, searching for miracles to perform, that he wore the soles of his shoes to nothing. In the chapel in Chimayo devoted to him, along with prayers and petitions and milagros, people left him children’s shoes—knit booties and beaded moccasins and sneakers and patent-leather Mary Janes scuffed at the toe. “Thanks,” she mumbled. Father Paul smiled with relief. He waved her away, pleased with himself. “You should pray with your babies. They can hear you, you know.” He stood smiling at her for another torturously long moment, then left. Crystal gripped the card, enraged. Who was Father Paul to tell her that her life might be saved by a child? What could he possibly know about being trapped forever by your own stupid biology? Or about the defeat of moving home, where every night your mother was on the living-room couch, suit skirt unzipped, watching a game show and eating microwaved hash browns slathered in red chile, her smelly panty-hosed feet on the coffee table? Heartsick, Crystal thought of her old apartment, quiet and hers alone. Maybe she’d never wanted escape, college, a future, she thought bitterly. Maybe some part of her had been seeking a comforting narrowing of possibilities, an excuse to give up on her life. If this was all life was—working in the office of a small Santa Fe parish, living at home with her mother and twin babies—then it was at least manageable. She had thrown the prayer card out, right there in the kitchen trash. She had slammed the back door, leaving the little Santo Niño with his girlish misty eyes gazing up, daring Father Paul to find him. Now, as Crystal crossed the parking lot toward the rectory, she hoped that he hadn’t. She’d been bratty, throwing out his gift. Because what would she have preferred? To be scolded? To be made to sit facing the congregation each Sunday during Mass, the way pregnant girls were punished in the old days? The wind was blowing, and leaves and dust skittered across the blacktop. It was late fall now, chilly, but Crystal was sweating through her shirt. Pregnancy had made her clammy and zitty and fat. She flapped her arms, willing the dark spots to dry, and pushed open the back door of the rectory. She was greeted by the familiar hush and the smell of old cooking. On the stove were the gray remains of a pan-fried steak; on the counter, a sticky ice-cream carton. The sink was full of dishes—couldn’t they just put them in the dishwasher? “Father Paul?” she called. He wasn’t in his study. She started down the dim carpeted hall, lightening her step out of habit as she passed Father Leon’s closed study door. No matter the hour, the rectory, with its small windows and sheer drapes, always felt muted with late-afternoon light. “Father Paul?” she called again, as much to announce herself as to find him. She hoped he wasn’t still asleep. What if she had to step into his bedroom, shake him awake? She recoiled at the thought of touching his bony shoulder through his pajamas. But, thank God, the bedroom was empty, the bed with its incongruous floral spread made in Father Paul’s usual hasty way. It was a weird room, she often thought. Maybe it was a result of the vow of poverty, or the sign of a sparse personality, but there were few personal effects: a kachina, a bottle of Jergens lotion, some change, and a couple of bent collars. No boxes of letters or journals or bedside drawers to snoop through—though she’d looked once, a little. The only trace of the individual who’d slept here for decades was a photograph: Father Paul as a happy young priest standing beside a beaming woman who must be his mother, a woman who, with her high cheekbones and heavy black eyebrows, might have been a distant relative of Crystal herself. Maybe Father Paul had dropped dead, Crystal thought with a thrill of fear. At the end of the shadowy hall, the bathroom door was open, the pink tile glowing, and she approached with reluctance. “Father Paul?” Empty. For a long moment she stood outside Father Leon’s study. For the first time Crystal wondered how it was for Father Paul, having to mediate between Father Leon and everyone else, how it was for each of them, living here so intimately with a complete stranger. Finally, she tapped and opened the door. Father Leon looked up from his desk and frowned at her from behind his giant, smoky plastic-rimmed glasses. Barely thirty and already so stern. You wouldn’t catch Father Leon admitting mistakes to the congregation. She couldn’t begin to guess what went on in his mind. “Is this important, Miss? I am in the midst of doing my work.” “Sorry to bother you,” Crystal said. “But have you seen Father Paul? His appointment is waiting.” “I have not seen Father Lujan this morning.” Father Leon would have made a much more sinister dream villain, with his thick accent and his formal English. Though this was probably racist. Crystal shifted in the doorway. “You have no idea where he is? Would you meet with the couple, then?” Father Leon closed his eyes with forbearance. “Sorry. Collette told me to ask.” “I do support your right to free speech—I just don’t support your tone.”Buy the print » Father Leon regarded her coldly. He paused with his palms on his book, then stood. “I will go.” “Thank you so much, Father Leon,” she said, her voice bright and emphatic and teetering just this side of sarcasm. He walked past without looking at her. In the kitchen, Crystal rinsed the dishes and loaded them into the dishwasher. She didn’t care if she was racist or not, Father Leon was a jerk. Crystal couldn’t help smiling at the thought of him baffling the couple with his accent, advising them with nervous grimness about natural family planning. Crystal wiped the counters and rinsed the sponge, which was already slick and smelly, even though she’d just put out a new one. When she shut off the faucet, she heard Father Paul calling from somewhere in the house. “Crystal?” She looked in the living room—there was the couch from her dream—and down the hall. Father Paul poked his head out his bedroom door, then withdrew it. Crystal dried her hands on a dish towel as she retraced her steps. “Jeez, Father Paul. Where’ve you been hiding? I looked everywhere for you.” He was in his usual black pants and shirt and collar, but barefoot, standing in the middle of his room. Crystal hesitated in the doorway; she’d never been in the bedroom when he was there. “Are you O.K., Father Paul?” “He’s gone, right?” “Father Leon? He’s down at the office. Meeting with your eight-o’clock. Did you forget about them?” “Come in, please.” “O.K.,” Crystal said warily. The card. Had he found the card? She scanned the room again—top of the bureau, bedside table—but it wasn’t there. Could he tell that she didn’t want to go near him? She stepped unwillingly across the threshold, but Father Paul drew her by the wrist to the closet door. “I need you to throw something away for me.” His voice was low. He pointed to a perfectly good rolling carry-on suitcase standing upright under the neat row of black shirts and pants. “Throw that away? But why?” She hoped it wasn’t infested with bedbugs or fleas. He cleared his throat, seeming to reach for some authority. “Just put it in the dumpster, Crystal.” He extended the handle and pushed the suitcase at her. Inside, something clinked softly. “What’s in there, Father Paul? I can’t just—” What crime was she being asked to cover up? “Don’t look inside,” he said, but he made no move to stop her when she lowered herself with difficulty and drew the zipper. The suitcase was filled with empty vodka bottles. Nearly all were glass minis, but there were also several cheap plastic fifths. Taaka, Empire, Neva. “Father Paul,” Crystal said carefully, standing. “You’ve been clean twenty-eight years.” He inclined his head with exaggerated patience. “Yes, Crystal. That is why I need you to get rid of this.” She sniffed. She’d never smelled liquor on him, but you never really got that close to a priest, did you? “Have you been drinking this morning?” she asked, but Father Paul just gave her a withering look. “Do you need me to get Collette? Let me get Collette.” Collette would know what to do. She’d snort and scoff and put Father Paul right. “No! Listen to me. I can’t trust anyone else. You know why he’s here, don’t you? To force me out.” “Father Leon? That’s silly. Father Leon could never replace you.” She tried to envision the young priest plotting in his study and laughed a little. “Father Paul, honestly, no one even likes him. You are the parish.” Father Paul took off his glasses and rubbed first one lens then the other on his shirt. Without the glasses, his eyes looked small and red, the skin around them wrinkled, shiny, thin. He pinched a lens between his thumb and forefinger. “Let me explain something to you, Crystal. When the bishop makes these assignments, he makes them for a reason. That man”—he jutted his chin toward the door—“the Church in Nigeria, in Africa in general, it’s very . . . traditional. The fact is, they think I’m weak, and they’ve sent him to ruin me.” “That can’t be.” Crystal supposed what he said was plausible. “The Da Vinci Code,” the sex-abuse scandals: everyone knew the Church could be ruthless. “No one wants to hurt you, Father Paul,” she said without conviction. He replaced the glasses over his closed eyes and seemed to come to a decision. “The fact is, I don’t even know that I’m the one drinking. I’m telling you, that man is like a cat, playing his mind games.” “What?” “I’ve tried locking the door, but he gets in. I wake up and the bottles are there, and I can feel it in my system. I know he’s been here.” “Come on, Father Paul,” Crystal said sharply. What was he saying—that Father Leon was creeping into his bedroom at night, plying him with liquor? Or that Father Leon was deploying some dark sorcery? “You don’t believe me. Fine.” Could he possibly believe himself? No one could sleep through that. And, however odd and standoffish Father Leon might be, she didn’t think he was malicious. Or stupid enough to force liquor down his superior’s throat after a few weeks on the job. Which meant that Father Paul was either lying or out of his mind. But she could think of no reason for him to lie; he could easily throw the bottles away in the dead of night. Why seek her out and show her the bottles unless he truly believed he was in danger? This was crazy—and cruel, too, Crystal thought with a rush of outrage, scapegoating a friendless, homesick man. Moments ago, sitting behind his big desk, Father Leon had just looked young and alone. No wonder he hid out in his study. She thought of Collette’s grim warning that alcoholics never recovered. Had Father Paul spent the past twenty-eight years craving self-destruction, pulling back at the last minute each time? Maybe with Father Leon here to share duties, he’d let himself go—just an occasional sip at first, and then everything slid out from under him, leaving him to retreat into this insane story, paranoid and ashamed with his stash of empties. Crystal flushed with irritation. Why couldn’t Father Paul just admit that he’d fallen off the wagon? Why this elaborate ruse? All that hoopla over being late, as if his minor sins needed so much more forgiveness than Crystal’s major ones, as if Crystal were expected to screw up, whereas it was a big fucking deal when he did. He couldn’t help proving to her just how bad she was, lording it over her, shoving it in her face. It wasn’t enough that she’d had to humiliate herself in confession? She had to humor him, too? “I’m going to get Collette,” she said. “No! You can’t leave.” His voice dropped again. Father Paul reached for her arm, but she dodged his touch. “You have to help me. I’ve helped you.” Crystal stepped back, looked around the room. “O.K. Fine. I’ll throw away your suitcase.” Gladness lit through her at the prospect of escape. She’d walk briskly across the carpet, rolling the suitcase behind her, like a businesswoman at the airport. Down the back steps, and then she’d be outside in the cool day, free from the oppressive hush of the rectory, free from Father Paul and whatever demons had caught hold of him. “It’ll be O.K.,” she promised. The cheer in her voice was genuine. “Maybe get a bite to eat, splash some water on your face.” He looked her up and down, his mouth tense. Some new emotion had shifted his expression—dissatisfaction that he hadn’t convinced her of Father Leon’s treachery, perhaps, or disappointment at her eagerness to leave. “And how does it make you feel when she jumps over you and calls you a lazy dog?”Buy the print » “Why do you keep avoiding me, after all I’ve done?” Now he was looking not at her but at the sun-faded framed poster above her shoulder: the Pietà, a souvenir from someone’s long-ago trip to St. Peter’s Basilica. “You know,” he said calmly, “Father Leon doesn’t like you.” “I know,” she said, though she hadn’t known, not exactly. “He said we should let you go. He didn’t want you sitting in the front office.” Father Paul straightened now, oddly pleased. Earlier, then, when Father Leon had glared at her from behind his desk, he hadn’t been merely irritated at the interruption; she saw now that he’d been horrified by her messy fecundity. No real surprise, but, still, Crystal had let herself believe that her body didn’t matter. She’d let herself believe that it was irrelevant to her work, that she was safe here and forgiven. The real surprise, though, was that Father Paul wanted to hurt her. Courteous, heedful, absurd Father Paul. Father Paul, who saw pain in every face and gesture, whether it was there or not, wanted to hurt her, and that was what stung. She’d thought that she could disdain Father Paul’s kindness, and that it would somehow remain intact: unconditional, holy, and inhuman. Astonishing that she had been capable of such faith. “Well, who does that man think he is, telling us how to do things? I defended you. I put myself on the line for you.” His tone was wheedling. “I gave you the Santo Niño, too. Did you know the Santo Niño was my mother’s favorite?” He stuck out his chin, defiant. “Once a week she went to the Santuario in Chimayo. Used to walk there every Good Friday.” “It was nice of you to give me the card,” Crystal said, regarding him with loathing. “I appreciated that.” They stood facing each other, and time held steady. All her speculation, and Crystal didn’t know the first thing about this man. Then Father Paul bent suddenly at the waist, gasping like a sprinter. When he rose, his face was purple. He backed against the wall, pushing against it with his palms as if it might relent and absorb him. “Forgive me. I never should have said any of that.” He slid to the floor. His black pants tugged up, and his head drooped to his knees. “I forgive you.” Her voice was cold. “Forgiveness,” Father Paul said, as though the word disgusted him. “Forgiveness is a drug, too. Believe me. You can forgive and forgive until you’re high on it and you can’t stop. It’ll numb you as much as any of that stuff.” He extended his foot and kicked the suitcase, which tipped, spilling bottles onto the carpet. Crystal had the drowning sense that she’d lost track of what they were talking about. “I know you don’t like me,” Father Paul said, looking up at her. And what could Crystal say? Don’t be silly. Of course I do. And then there she’d be, lying to a priest. She should leave, go back to the office and pretend that none of this had happened. Instead, she crossed the room and sat beside him. “Please just hold me?” He looked at her as if asking permission, and when she neither gave nor withheld it, he leaned into her and rested his head on her shoulder. She might have expected to be filled with a deep, sexual revulsion, but she wasn’t. She didn’t touch him, but she didn’t push him away, either. Instead, Crystal placed her head against the wall and waited. Inside her, the babies stirred. She remembered the weekend and the icy horror that had swamped her when she realized how she’d put them at risk. She remembered the ultrasound stills, how she’d studied them, straining to connect the images to children, to her children, children who would come to shape her life. “Have you picked names?” the guy had asked Saturday night. She’d pretended to be asleep so that she wouldn’t have to lie. Where were her instincts? Where was the biological imperative to keep them safe? There must be some blockage, some deep damage that left her so cold. Crystal saw herself standing on that ratty street at dawn, waiting for the cab to take her away from her mistake. But instead of the cab it was the Santo Niño who would find her. The soles of his shoes would be worn away, his little toes poking through the leather. He would take Crystal’s hand in his pudgy one and lead her home. It was a lovely notion, and Crystal almost allowed herself to sink into it. But no. Crystal saw that she had misunderstood. In giving her the Santo Niño, Father Paul hadn’t meant that He would save her. And he hadn’t meant that the twins would save her, either. Even Father Paul, with all his hope, knew better. Instead, he’d been offering the prayer that the Santo Niño might save those babies from whatever Crystal was bound to do to them. Father Paul’s head was heavy, and she could smell his scalp: a warm, sour smell. For a moment in confession, she’d believed that he could absolve her. And, even now that he was diminished and trembling and possibly insane, part of her still believed. “I don’t even talk to them,” Crystal said. Father Paul took a deep, shuddering breath, like a child calming himself after a long cry. The sun filtered through the lace curtains above their heads. The window’s reflection was a mottled square of light on the glass of the framed poster, obscuring the image. Crystal saw that who she was didn’t matter to Father Paul, that in his mind she’d turned into something else completely. Mary Magdalene, maybe: the whore who instead of washing His feet Cloroxed the bathroom. Or the Virgin up there on the wall, holding her dead adult son across her lap. Father Paul’s own mother, even. And, for reasons she didn’t understand, Crystal didn’t resent this. Maybe later she would; maybe in a day, or in an hour, she’d feel compromised and used, and would hate Father Paul for it; but right now it seemed so easy to sit with him. The relief was astonishing, that Crystal could be the kind of person who might meet another person’s need. She watched the square of light in the glass. She breathed, and Father Paul breathed, and she felt the babies shift, navigating the tight space inside her. And then, on the other side of the rectory, the back door opened and slammed shut. Father Leon’s steps crossed the kitchen linoleum. On his way to his study, he would pass Father Paul’s open door. He would see the suitcase, the strewn bottles, the two of them nearly embracing on the bedroom floor. Father Leon would look from one to the other, his expression shading from perplexed to angry, but his gaze would rest on Crystal, because he would understand that she was guilty of something that she couldn’t deny or put into words. Crystal considered pulling away. There was still time. She might still hide the evidence, meet Father Leon casually in the hall, dish towel in hand. Beside her, she felt Father Paul tense and push his face into her shoulder. “You’re fine,” Crystal said. She placed her hand over Father Paul’s, but she was picturing her babies. Sheer skin, warm tangled limbs, tiny blue beating hearts. “You’re fine.”

Each time they had sex, she told Habara a strange and gripping story afterward. Like Queen Scheherazade in “A Thousand and One Nights.” Though, of course, Habara, unlike the king, had no plan to chop off her head the next morning. (She never stayed with him till morning, anyway.) She told Habara the stories because she wanted to, because, he guessed, she enjoyed curling up in bed and talking to a man during those languid, intimate moments after making love. And also, probably, because she wished to comfort Habara, who had to spend every day cooped up indoors. Because of this, Habara had dubbed the woman Scheherazade. He never used the name to her face, but it was how he referred to her in the small diary he kept. “Scheherazade came today,” he’d note in ballpoint pen. Then he’d record the gist of that day’s story in simple, cryptic terms that were sure to baffle anyone who might read the diary later. Habara didn’t know whether her stories were true, invented, or partly true and partly invented. He had no way of telling. Reality and supposition, observation and pure fancy seemed jumbled together in her narratives. Habara therefore enjoyed them as a child might, without questioning too much. What possible difference could it make to him, after all, if they were lies or truth, or a complicated patchwork of the two? Whatever the case, Scheherazade had a gift for telling stories that touched the heart. No matter what sort of story it was, she made it special. Her voice, her timing, her pacing were all flawless. She captured her listener’s attention, tantalized him, drove him to ponder and speculate, and then, in the end, gave him precisely what he’d been seeking. Enthralled, Habara was able to forget the reality that surrounded him, if only for a moment. Like a blackboard wiped with a damp cloth, he was erased of worries, of unpleasant memories. Who could ask for more? At this point in his life, that kind of forgetting was what Habara desired more than anything else. Scheherazade was thirty-five, four years older than Habara, and a full-time housewife with two children in elementary school (though she was also a registered nurse and was apparently called in for the occasional job). Her husband was a typical company man. Their home was a twenty-minute drive away from Habara’s. This was all (or almost all) the personal information she had volunteered. Habara had no way of verifying any of it, but he could think of no particular reason to doubt her. She had never revealed her name. “There’s no need for you to know, is there?” Scheherazade had asked. Nor had she ever called Habara by his name, though of course she knew what it was. She judiciously steered clear of the name, as if it would somehow be unlucky or inappropriate to have it pass her lips. On the surface, at least, this Scheherazade had nothing in common with the beautiful queen of “A Thousand and One Nights.” She was on the road to middle age and already running to flab, with jowls and lines webbing the corners of her eyes. Her hair style, her makeup, and her manner of dress weren’t exactly slapdash, but neither were they likely to receive any compliments. Her features were not unattractive, but her face lacked focus, so that the impression she left was somehow blurry. As a consequence, those who walked by her on the street, or shared the same elevator, probably took little notice of her. Ten years earlier, she might well have been a lively and attractive young woman, perhaps even turned a few heads. At some point, however, the curtain had fallen on that part of her life and it seemed unlikely to rise again. Scheherazade came to see Habara twice a week. Her days were not fixed, but she never came on weekends. No doubt she spent that time with her family. She always phoned an hour before arriving. She bought groceries at the local supermarket and brought them to him in her car, a small blue Mazda hatchback. An older model, it had a dent in its rear bumper and its wheels were black with grime. Parking it in the reserved space assigned to the house, she would carry the bags to the front door and ring the bell. After checking the peephole, Habara would release the lock, unhook the chain, and let her in. In the kitchen, she’d sort the groceries and arrange them in the refrigerator. Then she’d make a list of things to buy for her next visit. She performed these tasks skillfully, with a minimum of wasted motion, and saying little throughout. Once she’d finished, the two of them would move wordlessly to the bedroom, as if borne there by an invisible current. Scheherazade quickly removed her clothes and, still silent, joined Habara in bed. She barely spoke during their lovemaking, either, performing each act as if completing an assignment. When she was menstruating, she used her hand to accomplish the same end. Her deft, rather businesslike manner reminded Habara that she was a licensed nurse. After sex, they lay in bed and talked. More accurately, she talked and he listened, adding an appropriate word here, asking the occasional question there. When the clock said four-thirty, she would break off her story (for some reason, it always seemed to have just reached a climax), jump out of bed, gather up her clothes, and get ready to leave. She had to go home, she said, to prepare dinner. Habara would see her to the door, replace the chain, and watch through the curtains as the grimy little blue car drove away. At six o’ clock, he made a simple dinner and ate it by himself. He had once worked as a cook, so putting a meal together was no great hardship. He drank Perrier with his dinner (he never touched alcohol) and followed it with a cup of coffee, which he sipped while watching a DVD or reading. He liked long books, especially those he had to read several times to understand. There wasn’t much else to do. He had no one to talk to. No one to phone. With no computer, he had no way of accessing the Internet. No newspaper was delivered, and he never watched television. (There was a good reason for that.) It went without saying that he couldn’t go outside. Should Scheherazade’s visits come to a halt for some reason, he would be left all alone. Habara was not overly concerned about this prospect. If that happens, he thought, it will be hard, but I’ll scrape by one way or another. I’m not stranded on a desert island. No, he thought, I am a desert island. He had always been comfortable being by himself. What did bother him, though, was the thought of not being able to talk in bed with Scheherazade. Or, more precisely, missing the next installment of her story. “I was a lamprey eel in a former life,” Scheherazade said once, as they lay in bed together. It was a simple, straightforward comment, as offhand as if she had announced that the North Pole was in the far north. Habara hadn’t a clue what sort of creature a lamprey was, much less what one looked like. So he had no particular opinion on the subject. “Do you know how a lamprey eats a trout?” she asked. He didn’t. In fact, it was the first time he’d heard that lampreys ate trout. “Lampreys have no jaws. That’s what sets them apart from other eels.” “Huh? Eels have jaws?” “Haven’t you ever taken a good look at one?” she said, surprised. “I do eat eel now and then, but I’ve never had an opportunity to see if they have jaws.” “Well, you should check it out sometime. Go to an aquarium or someplace like that. Regular eels have jaws with teeth. But lampreys have only suckers, which they use to attach themselves to rocks at the bottom of a river or lake. Then they just kind of float there, waving back and forth, like weeds.” Habara imagined a bunch of lampreys swaying like weeds at the bottom of a lake. The scene seemed somehow divorced from reality, although reality, he knew, could at times be terribly unreal. “Lampreys live like that, hidden among the weeds. Lying in wait. Then, when a trout passes overhead, they dart up and fasten on to it with their suckers. Inside their suckers are these tonguelike things with teeth, which rub back and forth against the trout’s belly until a hole opens up and they can start eating the flesh, bit by bit.” “I wouldn’t like to be a trout,” Habara said. “Back in Roman times, they raised lampreys in ponds. Uppity slaves got chucked in and the lampreys ate them alive.” Habara thought that he wouldn’t have enjoyed being a Roman slave, either. “The first time I saw a lamprey was back in elementary school, on a class trip to the aquarium,” Scheherazade said. “The moment I read the description of how they lived, I knew that I’d been one in a former life. I mean, I could actually remember—being fastened to a rock, swaying invisibly among the weeds, eying the fat trout swimming by above me.” “Can you remember eating them?” “No, I can’t.” “Does anybody read script?”Buy the print » “That’s a relief,” Habara said. “But is that all you recall from your life as a lamprey—swaying to and fro at the bottom of a river?” “A former life can’t be called up just like that,” she said. “If you’re lucky, you get a flash of what it was like. It’s like catching a glimpse through a tiny hole in a wall. Can you recall any of your former lives?” “No, not one,” Habara said. Truth be told, he had never felt the urge to revisit a former life. He had his hands full with the present one. “Still, it felt pretty neat at the bottom of the lake. Upside down with my mouth fastened to a rock, watching the fish pass overhead. I saw a really big snapping turtle once, too, a humongous black shape drifting past, like the evil spaceship in ‘Star Wars.’ And big white birds with long, sharp beaks; from below, they looked like white clouds floating across the sky.” “And you can see all these things now?” “As clear as day,” Scheherazade said. “The light, the pull of the current, everything. Sometimes I can even go back there in my mind.” “To what you were thinking then?” “Yeah.” “What do lampreys think about?” “Lampreys think very lamprey-like thoughts. About lamprey-like topics in a context that’s very lamprey-like. There are no words for those thoughts. They belong to the world of water. It’s like when we were in the womb. We were thinking things in there, but we can’t express those thoughts in the language we use out here. Right?” “Hold on a second! You can remember what it was like in the womb?” “Sure,” Scheherazade said, lifting her head to see over his chest. “Can’t you?” No, he said. He couldn’t. “Then I’ll tell you sometime. About life in the womb.” “Scheherazade, Lamprey, Former Lives” was what Habara recorded in his diary that day. He doubted that anyone who came across it would guess what the words meant. Habara had met Scheherazade for the first time four months earlier. He had been transported to this house, in a provincial city north of Tokyo, and she had been assigned to him as his “support liaison.” Since he couldn’t go outside, her role was to buy food and other items he required and bring them to the house. She also tracked down whatever books and magazines he wished to read, and any CDs he wanted to listen to. In addition, she chose an assortment of DVDs—though he had a hard time accepting her criteria for selection on this front. A week after he arrived, as if it were a self-evident next step, Scheherazade had taken him to bed. There had been condoms on the bedside table when he arrived. Habara guessed that sex was one of her assigned duties—or perhaps “support activities” was the term they used. Whatever the term, and whatever her motivation, he’d gone with the flow and accepted her proposal without hesitation. Their sex was not exactly obligatory, but neither could it be said that their hearts were entirely in it. She seemed to be on guard, lest they grow too enthusiastic—just as a driving instructor might not want his students to get too excited about their driving. Yet, while the lovemaking was not what you’d call passionate, it wasn’t entirely businesslike, either. It may have begun as one of her duties (or, at least, as something that was strongly encouraged), but at a certain point she seemed—if only in a small way—to have found a kind of pleasure in it. Habara could tell this from certain subtle ways in which her body responded, a response that delighted him as well. After all, he was not a wild animal penned up in a cage but a human being equipped with his own range of emotions, and sex for the sole purpose of physical release was hardly fulfilling. Yet to what extent did Scheherazade see their sexual relationship as one of her duties, and how much did it belong to the sphere of her personal life? He couldn’t tell. This was true of other things, too. Habara often found Scheherazade’s feelings and intentions hard to read. For example, she wore plain cotton panties most of the time. The kind of panties he imagined housewives in their thirties usually wore—though this was pure conjecture, since he had no experience with housewives of that age. Some days, however, she turned up in colorful, frilly silk panties instead. Why she switched between the two he hadn’t a clue. The other thing that puzzled him was the fact that their lovemaking and her storytelling were so closely linked, making it hard to tell where one ended and the other began. He had never experienced anything like this before: although he didn’t love her, and the sex was so-so, he was tightly bound to her physically. It was all rather confusing. “I was a teen-ager when I started breaking into empty houses,” she said one day as they lay in bed. Habara—as was often the case when she told stories—found himself at a loss for words. “Have you ever broken into somebody’s house?” she asked. “I don’t think so,” he answered in a dry voice. “Do it once and you get addicted.” “But it’s illegal.” “You betcha. It’s dangerous, but you still get hooked.” Habara waited quietly for her to continue. “The coolest thing about being in someone else’s house when there’s no one there,” Scheherazade said, “is how silent it is. Not a sound. It’s like the quietest place in the world. That’s how it felt to me, anyway. When I sat on the floor and kept absolutely still, my life as a lamprey came back to me. I told you about my being a lamprey in a former life, right?” “Yes, you did.” “It was just like that. My suckers stuck to a rock underwater and my body waving back and forth overhead, like the weeds around me. Everything so quiet. Though that may have been because I had no ears. On sunny days, light shot down from the surface like an arrow. Fish of all colors and shapes drifted by above. And my mind was empty of thoughts. Other than lamprey thoughts, that is. Those were cloudy but very pure. It was a wonderful place to be.” The first time Scheherazade broke into someone’s house, she explained, she was a high-school junior and had a serious crush on a boy in her class. Though he wasn’t what you would call handsome, he was tall and clean-cut, a good student who played on the soccer team, and she was powerfully attracted to him. But he apparently liked another girl in their class and took no notice of Scheherazade. In fact, it was possible that he was unaware she existed. Nevertheless, she couldn’t get him out of her mind. Just seeing him made her breathless; sometimes she felt as if she were going to throw up. If she didn’t do something about it, she thought, she might go crazy. But confessing her love was out of the question. One day, Scheherazade skipped school and went to the boy’s house. It was about a fifteen-minute walk from where she lived. She had researched his family situation beforehand. His mother taught Japanese language at a school in a neighboring town. His father, who had worked at a cement company, had been killed in a car accident some years earlier. His sister was a junior-high-school student. This meant that the house should be empty during the day. Not surprisingly, the front door was locked. Scheherazade checked under the mat for a key. Sure enough, there was one there. Quiet residential communities in provincial cities like theirs had little crime, and a spare key was often left under a mat or a potted plant. To be safe, Scheherazade rang the bell, waited to make sure there was no answer, scanned the street in case she was being observed, opened the door, and entered. She locked the door again from the inside. Taking off her shoes, she put them in a plastic bag and stuck it in the knapsack on her back. Then she tiptoed up the stairs to the second floor. His bedroom was there, as she had imagined. His bed was neatly made. On the bookshelf was a small stereo, with a few CDs. On the wall, there was a calendar with a photo of the Barcelona soccer team and, next to it, what looked like a team banner, but nothing else. No posters, no pictures. Just a cream-colored wall. A white curtain hung over the window. The room was tidy, everything in its place. No books strewn about, no clothes on the floor. The room testified to the meticulous personality of its inhabitant. Or else to a mother who kept a perfect house. Or both. It made Scheherazade nervous. Had the room been sloppier, no one would have noticed whatever little messes she might make. Yet, at the same time, the very cleanliness and simplicity of the room, its perfect order, made her happy. It was so like him. Scheherazade lowered herself into the desk chair and sat there for a while. This is where he studies every night, she thought, her heart pounding. One by one, she picked up the implements on the desk, rolled them between her fingers, smelled them, held them to her lips. His pencils, his scissors, his ruler, his stapler—the most mundane objects became somehow radiant because they were his. “Will you buy us booze?”Buy the print » She opened his desk drawers and carefully checked their contents. The uppermost drawer was divided into compartments, each of which contained a small tray with a scattering of objects and souvenirs. The second drawer was largely occupied by notebooks for the classes he was taking at the moment, while the one on the bottom (the deepest drawer) was filled with an assortment of old papers, notebooks, and exams. Almost everything was connected either to school or to soccer. She’d hoped to come across something personal—a diary, perhaps, or letters—but the desk held nothing of that sort. Not even a photograph. That struck Scheherazade as a bit unnatural. Did he have no life outside of school and soccer? Or had he carefully hidden everything of a private nature, where no one would come across it? Still, just sitting at his desk and running her eyes over his handwriting moved Scheherazade beyond words. To calm herself, she got out of the chair and sat on the floor. She looked up at the ceiling. The quiet around her was absolute. In this way, she returned to the lampreys’ world. “So all you did,” Habara asked, “was enter his room, go through his stuff, and sit on the floor?” “No,” Scheherazade said. “There was more. I wanted something of his to take home. Something that he handled every day or that had been close to his body. But it couldn’t be anything important that he would miss. So I stole one of his pencils.” “A single pencil?” “Yes. One that he’d been using. But stealing wasn’t enough. That would make it a straightforward case of burglary. The fact that I had done it would be lost. I was the Love Thief, after all.” The Love Thief? It sounded to Habara like the title of a silent film. “So I decided to leave something behind in its place, a token of some sort. As proof that I had been there. A declaration that this was an exchange, not a simple theft. But what should it be? Nothing popped into my head. I searched my knapsack and my pockets, but I couldn’t find anything appropriate. I kicked myself for not having thought to bring something suitable. Finally, I decided to leave a tampon behind. An unused one, of course, still in its plastic wrapper. My period was getting close, so I was carrying it around just to be safe. I hid it at the very back of the bottom drawer, where it would be difficult to find. That really turned me on. The fact that a tampon of mine was stashed away in his desk drawer. Maybe it was because I was so turned on that my period started almost immediately after that.” A tampon for a pencil, Habara thought. Perhaps that was what he should write in his diary that day: “Love Thief, Pencil, Tampon.” He’d like to see what they’d make of that! “I was there in his home for only fifteen minutes or so. I couldn’t stay any longer than that: it was my first experience of sneaking into a house, and I was scared that someone would turn up while I was there. I checked the street to make sure that the coast was clear, slipped out the door, locked it, and replaced the key under the mat. Then I went to school. Carrying his precious pencil.” Scheherazade fell silent. From the look of it, she had gone back in time and was picturing the various things that had happened next, one by one. “That week was the happiest of my life,” she said after a long pause. “I scribbled random things in my notebook with his pencil. I sniffed it, kissed it, rubbed my cheek with it, rolled it between my fingers. Sometimes I even stuck it in my mouth and sucked on it. Of course, it pained me that the more I wrote the shorter it got, but I couldn’t help myself. If it got too short, I thought, I could always go back and get another. There was a whole bunch of used pencils in the pencil holder on his desk. He wouldn’t have a clue that one was missing. And he probably still hadn’t found the tampon tucked away in his drawer. That idea excited me no end—it gave me a strange ticklish sensation down below. It didn’t bother me anymore that in the real world he never looked at me or showed that he was even aware of my existence. Because I secretly possessed something of his—a part of him, as it were.” Ten days later, Scheherazade skipped school again and paid a second visit to the boy’s house. It was eleven o’clock in the morning. As before, she fished the key from under the mat and opened the door. Again, his room was in flawless order. First, she selected a pencil with a lot of use left in it and carefully placed it in her pencil case. Then she gingerly lay down on his bed, her hands clasped on her chest, and looked up at the ceiling. This was the bed where he slept every night. The thought made her heart beat faster, and she found it difficult to breathe normally. Her lungs weren’t filling with air and her throat was as dry as a bone, making each breath painful. Scheherazade got off the bed, straightened the covers, and sat down on the floor, as she had on her first visit. She looked back up at the ceiling. I’m not quite ready for his bed, she told herself. That’s still too much to handle. This time, Scheherazade spent half an hour in the house. She pulled his notebooks from the drawer and glanced through them. She found a book report and read it. It was on “Kokoro,” a novel by Soseki Natsume, that summer’s reading assignment. His handwriting was beautiful, as one would expect from a straight-A student, not an error or an omission anywhere. The grade on it was Excellent. What else could it be? Any teacher confronted with penmanship that perfect would automatically give it an Excellent, whether he bothered to read a single line or not. Scheherazade moved on to the chest of drawers, examining its contents in order. His underwear and socks. Shirts and pants. His soccer uniform. They were all neatly folded. Nothing stained or frayed. Had he done the folding? Or, more likely, had his mother done it for him? She felt a pang of jealousy toward the mother, who could do these things for him each and every day. Scheherazade leaned over and sniffed the clothes in the drawers. They all smelled freshly laundered and redolent of the sun. She took out a plain gray T-shirt, unfolded it, and pressed it to her face. Might not a whiff of his sweat remain under the arms? But there was nothing. Nevertheless, she held it there for some time, inhaling through her nose. She wanted to keep the shirt for herself. But that would be too risky. His clothes were so meticulously arranged and maintained. He (or his mother) probably knew the exact number of T-shirts in the drawer. If one went missing, all hell might break loose.Scheherazade carefully refolded the T-shirt and returned it to its proper place. In its stead, she took a small badge, shaped like a soccer ball, that she found in one of the desk drawers. It seemed to date back to a team from his grade-school years. She doubted that he would miss it. At the very least, it would be some time before he noticed that it was gone. While she was at it, she checked the bottom drawer of the desk for the tampon. It was still there. Scheherazade tried to imagine what would happen if his mother discovered the tampon. What would she think? Would she demand that he explain what on earth a tampon was doing in his desk? Or would she keep her discovery a secret, turning her dark suspicions over and over in her mind? Scheherazade had no idea. But she decided to leave the tampon where it was. After all, it was her very first token. To commemorate her second visit, Scheherazade left behind three strands of her hair. The night before, she had plucked them out, wrapped them in plastic, and sealed them in a tiny envelope. Now she took this envelope from her knapsack and slipped it into one of the old math notebooks in his drawer. The three hairs were straight and black, neither too long nor too short. No one would know whose they were without a DNA test, though they were clearly a girl’s. She left his house and went straight to school, arriving in time for her first afternoon class. Once again, she was content for about ten days. She felt that he had become that much more hers. But, as you might expect, this chain of events would not end without incident. For, as Scheherazade had said, sneaking into other people’s homes is highly addictive. At this point in the story Scheherazade glanced at the bedside clock and saw that it was 4:32 P.M. “Got to get going,” she said, as if to herself. She hopped out of bed and put on her plain white panties, hooked her bra, slipped into her jeans, and pulled her dark-blue Nike sweatshirt over her head. Then she scrubbed her hands in the bathroom, ran a brush through her hair, and drove away in her blue Mazda. Left alone with nothing in particular to do, Habara lay in bed and ruminated on the story she had just told him, savoring it bit by bit, like a cow chewing its cud. Where was it headed? he wondered. As with all her stories, he hadn’t a clue. He found it difficult to picture Scheherazade as a high-school student. Was she slender then, free of the flab she carried today? School uniform, white socks, her hair in braids? “Because you’re not naked, and you’re not a cowboy, that’s why!”Buy the print » He wasn’t hungry yet, so he put off preparing his dinner and went back to the book he had been reading, only to find that he couldn’t concentrate. The image of Scheherazade sneaking into her classmate’s room and burying her face in his shirt was too fresh in his mind. He was impatient to hear what had happened next. Scheherazade’s next visit to the house was three days later, after the weekend had passed. As always, she came bearing large paper bags stuffed with provisions. She went through the food in the fridge, replacing everything that was past its expiration date, examined the canned and bottled goods in the cupboard, checked the supply of condiments and spices to see what was running low, and wrote up a shopping list. She put some bottles of Perrier in the fridge to chill. Finally, she stacked the new books and DVDs she had brought with her on the table. “Is there something more you need or want?” “Can’t think of anything,” Habara replied. Then, as always, the two went to bed and had sex. After an appropriate amount of foreplay, he slipped on his condom, entered her, and, after an appropriate amount of time, ejaculated. After casting a professional eye on the contents of his condom, Scheherazade began the latest installment of her story. As before, she felt happy and fulfilled for ten days after her second break-in. She tucked the soccer badge away in her pencil case and from time to time fingered it during class. She nibbled on the pencil she had taken and licked the lead. All the time she was thinking of his room. She thought of his desk, the bed where he slept, the chest of drawers packed with his clothes, his pristine white boxer shorts, and the tampon and three strands of hair she had hidden in his drawer. She had lost all interest in schoolwork. In class, she either fiddled with the badge and the pencil or gave in to daydreams. When she went home, she was in no state of mind to tackle her homework. Scheherazade’s grades had never been a problem. She wasn’t a top student, but she was a serious girl who always did her assignments. So when her teacher called on her in class and she was unable to give a proper answer, he was more puzzled than angry. Eventually, he summoned her to the staff room during the lunch break. “What’s the problem?” he asked her. “Is anything bothering you?” She could only mumble something vague about not feeling well. Her secret was too weighty and dark to reveal to anyone—she had to bear it alone. “I had to keep breaking into his house,” Scheherazade said. “I was compelled to. As you can imagine, it was a very risky business. Even I could see that. Sooner or later, someone would find me there, and the police would be called. The idea scared me to death. But, once the ball was rolling, there was no way I could stop it. Ten days after my second ‘visit,’ I went there again. I had no choice. I felt that if I didn’t I would go off the deep end. Looking back, I think I really was a little crazy.” “Didn’t it cause problems for you at school, skipping class so often?” Habara asked. “My parents had their own business, so they were too busy to pay much attention to me. I’d never caused any problems up to then, never challenged their authority. So they figured a hands-off approach was best. Forging notes for school was a piece of cake. I explained to my homeroom teacher that I had a medical problem that required me to spend half a day at the hospital from time to time. Since the teachers were racking their brains over what to do about the kids who hadn’t come to school in ages, they weren’t too concerned about me taking half a day off every now and then.” Scheherazade shot a quick glance at the clock next to the bed before continuing. “I got the key from under the mat and entered the house for a third time. It was as quiet as before—no, even quieter for some reason. It rattled me when the refrigerator turned on—it sounded like a huge beast sighing. The phone rang while I was there. The ringing was so loud and harsh that I thought my heart would stop. I was covered with sweat. No one picked up, of course, and it stopped after about ten rings. The house felt even quieter then.” Scheherazade spent a long time stretched out on his bed that day. This time her heart did not pound so wildly, and she was able to breathe normally. She could imagine him sleeping peacefully beside her, even feel as if she were watching over him as he slept. She felt that, if she reached out, she could touch his muscular arm. He wasn’t there next to her, of course. She was just lost in a haze of daydreams. She felt an overpowering urge to smell him. Rising from the bed, she walked over to his chest of drawers, opened one, and examined the shirts inside. All had been washed and neatly folded. They were pristine, and free of odor, just like before. Then an idea struck her. She raced down the stairs to the first floor. There, in the room beside the bath, she found the laundry hamper and removed the lid. Mixed together were the soiled clothes of the three family members—mother, daughter, and son. A day’s worth, from the looks of it. Scheherazade extracted a piece of male clothing. A white crew-neck T-shirt. She took a whiff. The unmistakable scent of a young man. A mustiness she had smelled before, when her male classmates were close by. Not a scintillating odor, to be sure. But the fact that this smell was his brought Scheherazade unbounded joy. When she put her nose next to the armpits and inhaled, she felt as though she were in his embrace, his arms wrapped firmly about her. T-shirt in hand, Scheherazade climbed the stairs to the second floor and lay on his bed once more. She buried her face in his shirt and greedily breathed in. Now she could feel a languid sensation in the lower part of her body. Her nipples were stiffening as well. Could her period be on the way? No, it was much too early. Was this sexual desire? If so, then what could she do about it? She had no idea. One thing was for sure, though—there was nothing to be done under these circumstances. Not here in his room, on his bed. In the end, Scheherazade decided to take the shirt home with her. It was risky, for sure. His mother was likely to figure out that a shirt was missing. Even if she didn’t realize that it had been stolen, she would still wonder where it had gone. Any woman who kept her house so spotless was bound to be a neat freak of the first order. When something went missing, she would search the house from top to bottom, like a police dog, until she found it. Undoubtedly, she would uncover the traces of Scheherazade in her precious son’s room. But, even as Scheherazade understood this, she didn’t want to part with the shirt. Her brain was powerless to persuade her heart. Instead, she began thinking about what to leave behind. Her panties seemed like the best choice. They were of an ordinary sort, simple, relatively new, and fresh that morning. She could hide them at the very back of his closet. Could there be anything more appropriate to leave in exchange? But, when she took them off, the crotch was damp. I guess this comes from desire, too, she thought. It would hardly do to leave something tainted by her lust in his room. She would only be degrading herself. She slipped them back on and began to think about what else to leave. Scheherazade broke off her story. For a long time, she didn’t say a word. She lay there breathing quietly with her eyes closed. Beside her, Habara followed suit, waiting for her to resume. At last, she opened her eyes and spoke. “Hey, Mr. Habara,” she said. It was the first time she had addressed him by name. Habara looked at her. “Do you think we could do it one more time?” “I think I could manage that,” he said. So they made love again. This time, though, was very different from the time before. Violent, passionate, and drawn out. Her climax at the end was unmistakable. A series of powerful spasms that left her trembling. Even her face was transformed. For Habara, it was like catching a brief glimpse of Scheherazade in her youth: the woman in his arms was now a troubled seventeen-year-old girl who had somehow become trapped in the body of a thirty-five-year-old housewife. Habara could feel her in there, her eyes closed, her body quivering, innocently inhaling the aroma of a boy’s sweaty T-shirt. This time, Scheherazade did not tell him a story after sex. Nor did she check the contents of his condom. They lay there quietly next to each other. Her eyes were wide open, and she was staring at the ceiling. Like a lamprey gazing up at the bright surface of the water. How wonderful it would be, Habara thought, if he, too, could inhabit another time or space—leave this single, clearly defined human being named Nobutaka Habara behind and become a nameless lamprey. He pictured himself and Scheherazade side by side, their suckers fastened to a rock, their bodies waving in the current, eying the surface as they waited for a fat trout to swim smugly by. “I hate check writing, but, hey, it pays the bills.”Buy the print » “So what did you leave in exchange for the shirt?” Habara broke the silence. She did not reply immediately. “Nothing,” she said at last. “Nothing I had brought along could come close to that shirt with his odor. So I just took it and sneaked out. That was when I became a burglar, pure and simple.” When, twelve days later, Scheherazade went back to the boy’s house for the fourth time, there was a new lock on the front door. Its gold color gleamed in the midday sun, as if to boast of its great sturdiness. And there was no key hidden under the mat. Clearly, his mother’s suspicions had been aroused by the missing shirt. She must have searched high and low, coming across other signs that told of something strange going on in her house. Her instincts had been unerring, her reaction swift. Scheherazade was, of course, disappointed by this development, but at the same time she felt relieved. It was as if someone had stepped behind her and removed a great weight from her shoulders. This means I don’t have to go on breaking into his house, she thought. There was no doubt that, had the lock not been changed, her invasions would have gone on indefinitely. Nor was there any doubt that her actions would have escalated with each visit. Eventually, a member of the family would have shown up while she was on the second floor. There would have been no avenue of escape. No way to talk herself out of her predicament. This was the future that had been waiting for her, sooner or later, and the outcome would have been devastating. Now she had dodged it. Perhaps she should thank his mother—though she had never met the woman—for having eyes like a hawk. Scheherazade inhaled the aroma of his T-shirt each night before she went to bed. She slept with it next to her. She would wrap it in paper and hide it before she left for school in the morning. Then, after dinner, she would pull it out to caress and sniff. She worried that the odor might fade as the days went by, but that didn’t happen. The smell of his sweat had permeated the shirt for good. Now that further break-ins were out of the question, Scheherazade’s state of mind slowly began to return to normal. She daydreamed less in class, and her teacher’s words began to register. Nevertheless, her chief focus was not on her teacher’s voice but on her classmate’s behavior. She kept her eye discreetly trained on him, trying to detect a change, any indication at all that he might be nervous about something. But he acted exactly the same as always. He threw his head back and laughed as unaffectedly as ever, and answered promptly when called upon. He shouted as loudly in soccer practice and got just as sweaty. She could see no trace of anything out of the ordinary—just an upright young man, leading a seemingly unclouded existence. Still, Scheherazade knew of one shadow that was hanging over him. Or something close to that. No one else knew, in all likelihood. Just her (and, come to think of it, possibly his mother). On her third break-in, she had come across a number of pornographic magazines cleverly concealed in the farthest recesses of his closet. They were full of pictures of naked women, spreading their legs and offering generous views of their genitals. Some pictures portrayed the act of sex: men inserted rodlike penises into female bodies in the most unnatural of positions. Scheherazade had never laid eyes on photographs like these before. She sat at his desk and flipped slowly through the magazines, studying each photo with great interest. She guessed that he masturbated while viewing them. But the idea did not strike her as especially repulsive. She accepted masturbation as a perfectly normal activity. All those sperm had to go somewhere, just as girls had to have periods. In other words, he was a typical teen-ager. Neither hero nor saint. She found that knowledge something of a relief. “When my break-ins stopped, my passion for him began to cool. It was gradual, like the tide ebbing from a long, sloping beach. Somehow or other, I found myself smelling his shirt less often and spending less time caressing his pencil and badge. The fever was passing. What I had contracted was not something like sickness but the real thing. As long as it lasted, I couldn’t think straight. Maybe everybody goes through a crazy period like that at one time or another. Or maybe it was something that happened only to me. How about you? Did you ever have an experience like that?” Habara tried to remember, but drew a blank. “No, nothing that extreme, I don’t think,” he said. Scheherazade looked somewhat disappointed by his answer. “Anyway, I forgot all about him once I graduated. So quickly and easily, it was weird. What was it about him that had made the seventeen-year-old me fall so hard? Try as I might, I couldn’t remember. Life is strange, isn’t it? You can be totally entranced by something one minute, be willing to sacrifice everything to make it yours, but then a little time passes, or your perspective changes a bit, and all of a sudden you’re shocked at how its glow has faded. What was I looking at? you wonder. So that’s the story of my ‘breaking-and-entering’ period.” She made it sound like Picasso’s Blue Period, Habara thought. But he understood what she was trying to convey. She glanced at the clock next to the bed. It was almost time for her to leave. “To tell the truth,” she said finally, “the story doesn’t end there. A few years later, when I was in my second year of nursing school, a strange stroke of fate brought us together again. His mother played a big role in it; in fact, there was something spooky about the whole thing—it was like one of those old ghost stories. Events took a rather unbelievable course. Would you like to hear about it?” “I’d love to,” Habara said. “It had better wait till my next visit,” Scheherazade said. “It’s getting late. I’ve got to head home and fix dinner.” She got out of bed and put on her clothes—panties, stockings, camisole, and, finally, her skirt and blouse. Habara casually watched her movements from the bed. It struck him that the way women put on their clothes could be even more interesting than the way they took them off. “Any books in particular you’d like me to pick up?” she asked, on her way out the door. “No, nothing I can think of,” he answered. What he really wanted, he thought, was for her to tell him the rest of her story, but he didn’t put that into words. Doing so might jeopardize his chances of ever hearing it. Habara went to bed early that night and thought about Scheherazade. Perhaps he would never see her again. That worried him. The possibility was just too real. Nothing of a personal nature—no vow, no implicit understanding—held them together. Theirs was a chance relationship created by someone else, and might be terminated on that person’s whim. In other words, they were attached by a slender thread. It was likely—no, certain—that that thread would eventually be broken and all the strange and unfamiliar tales she might have told would be lost to him. The only question was when. It was also possible that he would, at some point, be deprived of his freedom entirely, in which case not only Scheherazade but all women would disappear from his life. Never again would he be able to enter the warm moistness of their bodies. Never again would he feel them quiver in response. Perhaps an even more distressing prospect for Habara than the cessation of sexual activity, however, was the loss of the moments of shared intimacy. What his time spent with women offered was the opportunity to be embraced by reality, on the one hand, while negating it entirely on the other. That was something Scheherazade had provided in abundance—indeed, her gift was inexhaustible. The prospect of losing that made him saddest of all. Habara closed his eyes and stopped thinking of Scheherazade. Instead, he thought of lampreys. Of jawless lampreys fastened to rocks, hiding among the waterweeds, swaying back and forth in the current. He imagined that he was one of them, waiting for a trout to appear. But no trout passed by, no matter how long he waited. Not a fat one, not a skinny one, no trout at all. Eventually the sun went down, and his world was enfolded in darkness.

Somewhere near the end, she decided that the drinking was the problem. So we stopped cold, both of us, in the middle of February. One of those winters where the sky looms over the town like a gray roof that never changes. Old ice and blackened snow in the gutters. It was maybe a mistake. It was maybe a mistake, but she might have been right, too. I have since stopped drinking for reasons of my own. But back then it was a test—as everything was a test—of how much we would endure in order to stay together. And sober we stayed for the rest of the winter. It was interesting, in a way. It was a departure for us, from the long evenings of drinking and laughing and fighting and sex. We’d have some modest, healthful dinner and then watch a movie, and then it would seem like there was nothing else to do. She’d go to work in her little office downstairs and I’d go to bed and listen to the wind in the eaves, the branches scratching against the windowpanes. The days, of course, were actually better: no hangovers, lots of energy. I’d be up at six, before the dawn, and we were both getting a lot of work done. Yes, it felt penitential at times, but at other times it felt as if we had solved a problem, undertaken some new way of life, done an important thing and done it together. This lasted until spring, until an evening in May. I was out on the porch, smoking a cigarette, enjoying the long, slow twilight of the northern spring, when I heard her scream inside the apartment. When I ran in, there was a bird flying around in circles above her head. I should explain about this apartment: it was very nice, very new, and the main part of it was open two stories up. The living room was a kind of gallery overhead, with the office and the bedroom underneath. The bird was circling in the middle of this grand open space, evidently in a panic, and she was trying to hit it with a broom. So far, she had knocked over a chair and a kettle. I asked her to stop. She wanted to know what I had in mind. We were just at the point where everything is a contest—the right way to do the dishes, drive a car, chase a bird out of a room. She agreed to try the way my mother had taught me, so we opened all the windows and all the screens and shut the lights off and left the room. We sat outside and shared a cigarette. She was going to a wedding in California the next weekend. I knew better, but I asked her anyway: was she going to be drinking at the wedding? Of course she was. Everybody was. What about, you know—what we agreed to? I’m not the one with the problem, she said. You’re the one with the problem. I went for a walk after that remark, down by the river, the gravel path busy with dog walkers and cyclists and college girls playing with Frisbees in the twilight. I knew the grocery store next to the apartment would be open until eleven, and I turned the matter over in my mind: a nice Côtes du Rhône, maybe, or a rosé we liked that wasn’t too sweet. Either that or I could pick up a lime and some tonic water. We still had a bottle of Bombay in the freezer, three-quarters full, which ought to tell you something about what we were doing. If we were not in this together . . . The bird was gone when I got home, and she was working in her office. I opened a bottle of club soda. There would be time for the rest of it later. The bird came back, a few nights later. At least, I think it was the same bird. My knowledge of these things is at a kindergarten level: robin, seagull, magpie, crow. But this one had the same yellow breast and a round black spot on top of its head, as if it were wearing a beret. It was a delicious spring night, and I had opened all the windows. I was sitting in a good chair under a lamp, with the rest of the house dark, sipping gin and reading one of her poetry books. This was when she was at the wedding, sleeping with her ex-boyfriend. I found out later. I read poetry about once a year, but this time I was looking for something, some secret or clue. That was the hunch I had, anyway, but what was between the covers just seemed like intelligent gibberish. I wanted some of the old heartbreak. I put her book back on her bookshelf, carefully, so she wouldn’t know I had taken it, so she wouldn’t know I had been looking for her secrets. I found my college copy of Auden and freshened my drink and settled in again: Hell is neither here nor there. . . . Just then the bird flew in. It circled under the big overhead fan, which was turning slowly but still worried me. I switched the fan off, then the reading light. The sound of wings in the dark was stirring. Then the fluttering stopped, and I thought it had left, but when I turned the light back on I knew it was in the room somewhere. I just had a feeling of being watched. And there it was, up on the railing of the living room, staring down at me. I could barely make out its shape, but I saw its eyes, glittering. Animal eyes in the dark. It wasn’t like the bird was going to hurt me or anything, but its presence made me uneasy, so I went out onto the porch with my poetry and gin. Whatever had made the Auden seem possible indoors, under a quiet solitary light, didn’t work at all in the warm expanding evening, and I put the book down and concentrated on my gin. When I went back in to refresh my drink, I couldn’t tell whether the bird was still there. In the refrigerator light, I had a creepy feeling that it might land on my back or my head, so I went outside again with my drink and my thoughts. I was thinking about the things I was afraid of: the likelihood of loss, of loneliness. But then I found myself remembering another time: a road trip we’d taken down through the mountains, she and I, that had wound up in a derelict hot springs at the end of a dirt road. The lodge was gray and tumbledown. The hippies who ran the place seemed to be waiting for something that wasn’t going to come. They had a blank-eyed, resigned look, the kind you see in the survivors of a tsunami or a typhoon. Suffering that doesn’t even know its own name. After ten o’clock only guests of the lodge were permitted in the pool, and we seemed to be the only guests. This is what I remembered: going out in our bathrobes, taking the bathrobes off, entering the warm water naked, feeling it close around our bodies. It was the edge of fall, so the air was cold, and steam rose from the warm water. We were touching. We were hidden by the steam, and no one was watching anyway, and then sometimes the steam would thin out or vanish completely and we’d get a brief glimpse of a brilliant night sky with clear, clean, glittering stars before the mist rushed in again. And then I was inside her, on the steps at the far end of the pool, half in and half out of the water, so there seemed to be no distinction between my body and hers, between water and air, and we were moving slowly against each other, no hurry, when the steam parted and there, a few feet away, staring directly at us, was a buck with a big spread of antlers and a few of his harem. Animal eyes in the dark. No human eyes could see us, and we didn’t stop. But I think we both felt those animal eyes on us as we were moving in the dark, in the space between air and water. It changed the thing, somehow. I could remember that feeling, sitting out there on my porch. She and I and the watching deer. It changed the thing. I woke at first light, six or so, with a dull ache behind my eyes and a tremendous thirst. Every window in the house was still open and a cool breeze, almost cold, blew through the apartment. The bird was gone. At least, I didn’t see it as I went from window to window, closing the house up. Nor did I find it later, as I was tidying the apartment. She was due back from the wedding that evening, and I wanted everything to be nice for her return. The sinks and counters and so on. It was a very pretty place, and we had furnished it together, though it was more her taste than mine. It was never going to be clean enough to make a difference between us, but I kept at it till it sparkled. I was expecting what? Nothing good. I was trying not to think about it. But when she came out of security she was happy to see me, and I saw right away how beautiful she was, and how I loved her. That smile when she saw me! Later, she told me how miserable she had been, and I believed her. But I also knew that smile, those moments of pure feeling, plain happiness. And the answering happiness in me. On the way home, she asked me to stop at the liquor store, and she bought a fresh bottle of Bombay, and when we got home she led me into the bedroom and took her clothes off and pulled me down onto the bed, which I didn’t need to be talked into: quick, hot, careless fucking. Afterward she went to the kitchen naked and made us each a gin-and-tonic, the way she liked it, with too much gin and too much lime and just a splash of tonic water, and she handed the glass to me and said, Hello, stranger. We had a few weeks of this. I wasn’t really expecting more, to tell the truth. All the nickels had already dropped in all the slots. We ate butter and steaks and ahi tuna that cost twenty-four dollars a pound, we drank French champagne and Russian vodka, we fought like two cats in a bag and then made up at three in the morning and had sloppy, sentimental sex. We played Scrabble in the small hours of the night, just the two of us. We smoked cigarettes until our lungs felt like sandpaper. The world divided itself into the drinking and the hangover, day and night, and we lived for the nights, the ones that ended in a blank place, half a memory to wake up to. And then it was summer. We packed the car with pink wine and sandwiches, apples and paperbacks, and headed south on two-lane highways, skipping the interstates in favor of the little towns of wandering dogs and cheerful bartenders. Her bare feet up on the dashboard. White peaks in the distance, sage flats in the sunlight, shimmering toward the horizon. We stayed in one-of-a-kind motels, the Bavarian Inn in Sun Valley, the Shady Grove Motor Court in Mexican Hat. We wound up following the Dolores River south, through red-rock canyons stained with ancient creosote, looking for rock art high up on the canyon rim. We saw little dancing men and stars and constellations engraved on the walls. I dropped her at the airport in Denver and went on south, to stay with my sister in Arizona. She flew home to pack her things and go. We didn’t get married, though both of us had thought we would. And we never got a dog. We’d wanted one, but we’d never agreed on a breed: she wanted a corgi, and I wanted a golden retriever. It’s strange the way those plans we made are still floating out there, without us. The possibilities. What if I had agreed to the corgi? What would have happened after that? I knew as soon as I got home from Arizona that I would not be able to stay in that beautiful apartment. She was everywhere, not just in the furniture and the mirrors and the art on the walls—she’d left in a hurry, like a woman fleeing a burning city—but in the plans we’d made and never carried out. I found a graduate-student couple to take over the lease and got a little house across town—nice enough, but no match for that apartment. The night before I moved, I made myself a gin-and-tonic and went from room to room, looking at all the absences: empty bookshelves, closets. The floral smell of her various products and potions still hung in the air. Every molecule of the place was hers. I took my drink out on the porch and sat in one of the two chairs, the other one empty. It was a delicate cool summer night, a little hint of the coming fall. I could get whatever kind of dog I wanted now. I could have a drink anytime. But, as I thought this, I also understood that without her there to keep me company, without her there to argue with me about it, there wouldn’t be any point to it pretty soon. And I was right about that.

Dara lives in a ramshackle white house on top of a steep hill. She is a potter—she works at the ceramics center in town—but her house is full of books: some novels, many thin volumes of poetry, collections of essays on feminism and psychoanalysis, Hungarian cinema, Soviet Jewry, Australian aborigines, Kant, the Kabbalah. Worlds upon worlds. She also has an extensive library of self-help books, which implies that, for all her intelligence and self-possession, Dara may have some problems. She is for sure a recovering alcoholic; one of the first things she told April P was that she doesn’t allow drinking or drugs in her house. Also, and she did not warn April P about this, Dara is a toucher. She keeps finding reasons to squeeze April P’s arm, pat her hand, give her a mini shoulder rub. Once, she invited April P to an opening at the ceramics center, a show of chili bowls by local artists. April P started a conversation with a woman her own age; then she saw Dara watching her with a furious expression, a gathering of crackly lines around the eyes, a pinching of the mouth, as though she would eat anyone who tried to be friendly with April P. Needless to say, Dara’s possessiveness makes April P uncomfortable. She has been in Rosendale for four months, and the only people she talks to are Dara, the guy at the vegan bakery, and Jenny, her friend at the club. She hasn’t done any writing at all. Writing was supposed to be the point of this adventure. April P came here to start another life, one she had barely begun to imagine for herself and still wasn’t sure she deserved. She was going to become April P, the writer. The centerpiece of her transformation was a memoir called “Bar Girl,” about her time tending bar at a notorious Boston hotel. She wrote the first chapter in a memoir workshop at the community college where she was supposed to be studying business communication, and her teacher, Valerie, praised it to the skies. Then, without warning, April P’s heart began to emanate the exciting certainty that she would not stay in Boston. She asked Valerie for advice, and it was Valerie who suggested Rosendale and put her in touch with Dara. April P moved to Rosendale in late November. At first she loved the town, with its odd shops—what kind of small town has a ceramics center?—and bookish, sober Dara, whose unfussy house had a view of the woods and the distant brown hills, but after a month she wondered if she had made the right decision. Without Boston shouting in her ear, she found it hard to think. The second chapter of “Bar Girl” crumpled into bits of paper in her wastebasket. She started to panic about money. Dara offered her a job at the ceramics center, but the pay was laughable; really, nothing in Rosendale paid anything. How did Dara get by? April P suspected her of sitting on a secret pile of cash, which she would never talk about but which kept her going. Winter came. Snow fell heavily in the valley; everything turned slippery and dark. Rosendale started to look like a kind of hell, at least for people like April P, that is, straight girls from working-class families. Then one day at the vegan bakery she met Jenny, who told her about the club. April P had driven past it a dozen times without knowing what it was, an anonymous roadhouse on Route 32 that never seemed to be open. Jenny explained it to her. You could be topless or nude; on a busy night you could make two or three hundred dollars. It beats working at the Stewart’s, Jenny said. April P drove out to the club and asked if they were hiring. After some icy awkwardness up front, the work turned out not to be that hard. You got undressed, you wobbled around—dance would be an overstatement. You sat in a stranger’s lap, you rubbed a little, but really it was just another service job, like tending bar or working at Kinko’s. So what if you were naked? The money was good, and the shifts were from six to two in the morning; April P had the whole day to herself. In fact, the hardest thing about working at the club was dealing with Dara’s complicated reaction. She was clearly trying to be O.K. with the fact that April P was a sex worker, but she was clearly also scandalized; at the same time, April P guessed that Dara couldn’t stand the thought that she took the stage nightly in nothing but a thong and that she, Dara, wasn’t there to watch. If only Dara had come to the club, some problems might have been solved—and others, doubtless, would have been created. But this is all background information. The actual story of Rosendale begins on a rainy Monday evening in March, when Dara comes home and finds April P curled up on the futon in the living room, reading Dara’s copy of “Frankenstein.” Dara makes twig tea and talks about Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley and Lord Byron. They were all living together in Switzerland, she says, and one night they had a contest to see who could write the most frightening story. Percy Shelley, the great Romantic poet, and Lord Byron, the other great Romantic poet, and Mary Shelley, an eighteen-year-old girl who had hardly written anything. Guess who won? Dara pours the tea into thick handmade mugs. Mary Shelley’s mother was the great feminist thinker Mary Wollstonecraft, but she died just after Mary was born, she says. When you’re reading “Frankenstein,” you have to think, This is a novel by a woman who never knew her mother. April P wonders what it would be like not to have known her mother. Kind of a relief, probably. Anyway, it’s cozy, sitting there with Dara, drinking twig tea while the rain beats the house and soaks the forest. If only April P could have kept her mouth shut, there would have been no problem. But the spirit of mischief rises in her and prompts her to say, Let’s have a horror-story contest! Dara thinks about it for a long time, then says, O.K., but there’s one condition: they have to be stories with strong female characters. Strong female characters, coming up! April P says impishly. They get out their journals and start writing. April P finds the task harder than she expected. She begins a story about a woman with no legs, but why does she have no legs? And what comes next? April P has never written a horror story before; up to this point, her stories have pretty much been based on things that actually happened to her. Still, she keeps writing, and after half an hour or so Dara says, I give up. Me, too, April P says, relieved. Read me what you wrote, Dara says. It doesn’t make sense, April P says, but Dara nags her until finally she reads it. Very interesting, Dara says. Read me yours, April P says. No, Dara says. Come on, April P says. Don’t be shy! Dara stands up. Her mouth is a thin straight line, and her eyes are narrow with anger. I’m not shy, but I am tired, she says, and stomps upstairs. April P picks up “Frankenstein” again, but she can’t concentrate, and after a few minutes she goes to bed, too, and just lies there, listening to the rain and wondering what she is doing in Rosendale. In the following weeks, Dara works late, and April P doesn’t see her much. Then one morning April P comes downstairs, and there she is, pretending to tidy the living room but obviously just waiting for April P. Good morning! Dara says. What are you doing today? April P has no plans, and so after breakfast Dara drives her to the ceramics center, where something big lies on a table, under a beige sheet. What is it? April P asks. Aha, Dara says, and she unveils a giant clay woman. The figure is about nine feet from head to toe, with thick legs, huge breasts, and vestigial arms. Its face is a noseless trio of dashes. Its clay body is covered with fragments of fired pottery, orange and white and a heartbreaking blue-green that makes April P think of the Atlantic Ocean. It is the ugliest thing she has ever seen. Dara tells April P that she modelled the figure on the Venus of Willendorf, a likeness of the mother goddess who ruled the universe in times gone by. And of course it’s also a golem, a creature from the Jewish tradition. If I could get a rabbi to perform the right ritual, Dara says, maybe she would come to life! Ha-ha, April P says, horrified. She touches the golem’s mosaic skin and asks, Are these the chili bowls? Yep, Dara says. Wow, April P says. O.K., you win! Dara pulls the sheet over the golem, and they go out for a cigarette—like many recovering alcoholics, Dara is a heavy smoker. It’s early spring; the creek is muddy with runoff from the hills. Tiny black birds agitate the trees. I feel so powerful, Dara says. She talks about a trip she took to Prague with her father, many years ago. They visited the synagogue where the original golem was supposedly constructed. Later on that same trip, Dara had a panic attack. She banged on her father’s hotel-room door. He was with a Czech prostitute, who was maybe seventeen. The fucker, Dara says. Then her mood lifts again. Holy crap, she says. I made a golem! She tries to imagine what such a thing might be good for. It could protect women from sexual assault, for starters. It could watch the ceramics center—there have been some break-ins. It could intervene in domestic-violence-type situations. It could give back rubs, April P says, giggling. I’m being serious, April, Dara says. She crinkles up her eyes. It’s clear that April P has ruined everything again. Dara says that she has some work to do. Will April P be all right walking home? It’s two miles uphill, but she says, I’ll be fine. Without a golem escort, she doesn’t add. Dara goes back into the ceramics center, and April P climbs the street that leads eventually to Dara’s house. The sun is out. Green shoots rise from the mud in people’s yards. Screw Dara, she thinks. Why should I give someone like that the power to make me miserable? Buy the print » That night at the club, though, it’s impossible for April P to forget that she is naked and other people aren’t. She gets flustered, and the customers sense it. All of a sudden, guys are touching her ass and telling her the gross things they want her to do. She rolls her eyes at Fred, the manager, but he pretends not to notice and goes on selling lap-dance tickets. What is it, she keeps asking herself. What is it? All she knows is that there is now an inner April P who wants out of the birthday suit, who writhes with self-consciousness even as the outer April P struts around in black vinyl boots. When her set is over, she asks Jenny if she has anything to calm her down. Just Newports, Jenny says. April P smokes two of them, but they don’t help. Do you know where I can buy drugs around here? she asks. Jenny gives her the number of a guy she knows from high school, a friend of a friend. After work, April P drives up to Kingston and buys some crack cocaine, which is what Jenny’s friend’s friend sells. She smokes it in her car. It makes her feel invulnerable and gorgeous, as if she were wearing the night sky and all its stars. She drives back to Rosendale around 3 A.M. and falls into bed. When she wakes up, the sun is about to bump the western hills. She has just enough time to stretch and shower before she has to go to work. April P goes out with Jenny that night and for many nights afterward. They sit around the apartments of Jenny’s high-school friends, drinking vodka and gossiping about other high-school friends whose lives are just as sorry as their own. These people are dismally familiar to April P: they’re like the ones she grew up with in Boston. Spending time with them feels like a kind of defeat, but at the same time she hears a voice telling her that they are her people, the best and only people she will ever have. When she can’t stand their Maxim dreams and TV jokes, she drives up to Kingston, puts on the suit of stars, and hurtles down Route 32, inviting an accident that for some reason never comes. She hardly thinks about Dara at all, until one night the golem shows up at the club. It sits at the bar, and at first she mistakes it for a hugely fat guy in a sparkly brown coat. It’s only when she steps off the stage that she recognizes it for what it is. Its slit eyes look sightlessly at the girls; its enormous breasts hang in its lap. For an awful moment, April P imagines that it will ask her for a dance, and that, by the logic of the nightmare she is in, she will have to give the golem a lap dance, but this does not happen. Then she wonders if this is a prank. Dara could have hauled the golem up here in her truck, and installed it on a barstool somehow—maybe with a hidden platform. Only, how would April P not have seen it until now? And why isn’t anyone laughing? April P takes a breath. She walks right past the golem, goes through the back of the club to the parking lot, and fires up her pipe. When she comes inside again, the golem is gone. No one at the club says anything about the golem. Maybe it was a hallucination? The problem with this hypothesis is that the golem keeps appearing. After that first visit, it shows up at the club roughly twice a month, as if to spend the paycheck from its golem job. (Which must not be a real paycheck; one of the things April P finds most frustrating about the golem is that it does not tip.) Sometimes it sits at the bar; sometimes it overflows a chair in front of the tiny stage. Its face is just those three dashes, but April P can feel it watching her. Once, as she walks past it—the layout of the club makes it impossible to avoid walking past the golem—she feels something cold and rough stroke the back of her leg. She spins around. Did the golem just touch her? It makes her want to scream. But, as before, no one else seems to notice that the golem is there, or, rather, no one seems to notice that it is a golem, and not just an oversized customer, with no cash and no real eyes, who reeks of wet earth. At this point, April P begins to entertain some really dark thoughts. What if this isn’t the first golem to come into the club? What if Rosendale is full of golems? She wants to confront Dara, but she is afraid of what Dara will say: that her job as a stripper is damaging her psyche, that the golem is a manifestation of some old trauma that would be better worked out in a chapter of her memoir. Besides, Dara has been keeping to herself a lot lately. She works long hours at the ceramics center and holes up in her bedroom, listening to old punk-rock albums that April P would never have suspected her of owning. Spring becomes summer. Rosendale is more beautiful than ever. The trees are wild with birds; the air smells like a garden. The mountains glow all day long. One night, Jenny says, Bring something nice to wear tomorrow. Why? April P asks. We’re going to a party, Jenny says, a fancy party. April P knows Jenny too well to believe that she is telling the truth, but out of loyalty she brings a pair of decent jeans and a silky sleeveless top she bought at Ann Taylor in a moment of deluded professionalism some years back. Jenny, on the other hand, wears a cocktail dress and preposterous red heels. Where are we going? April P asks. Jenny tells her that a famous magazine publisher is having a party at his mansion in the hills. His assistant came to the club, invited Jenny, and told her to bring a friend. Oh, April P says. Now she feels underdressed. They drive separately to the mansion, which really is a mansion, hidden at the end of a long driveway. It has a reflecting pool and a massive granite dolmen, behind which a rose garden sprawls. A man in a polo shirt parks April P’s car. I’ll bet Dara doesn’t know anyone this rich, she thinks, giddily. Then they go in, and April P realizes that she isn’t so much underdressed as just wearing the wrong clothes. The guests are all dressed like retired skateboarders; in her stupid Ann Taylor top, she feels like a very young and innocent Boston girl. Jenny, beside her, looks like a hooker. No one talks to either of them, and after a while they drift away and give themselves a tour of the house. There are paintings everywhere: some are gashes of color and some are portraits of serious-looking young men and women with a sixties look. It’s like being in a museum without the guards. April P touches a painting, and nothing happens. She touches another painting. She bounces on a soft bed, switches a light on and off. Jenny puts a crystal paperweight in her handbag. They go to the bathroom and smoke crack with the fan on. Then they go downstairs again. April P seizes a glass of champagne from a waiter. She approaches an old guy in half-glasses and a cardigan who looks like he might be the famous publisher and asks, So, what do you do? He works for a bank, which he says is very boring. Do you like these paintings? April P asks. Her frankness charms him; suddenly he’s talking about Venice, a silver tube, streamers blowing in the wind, the idea of objects, the rise and fall of boats in the water, Greece, seafood, the importance of not having a plan. April P thinks, This is a guy who has never been in danger. Listening to him is like stepping into a cathedral by daylight, all colorful and bright and still. The banker talks about England, childhood, omelettes, Spain, New Mexico, the beauty of deserts. April P keeps taking champagne glasses from waiters—at least, she thinks they’re waiters—taking one for herself and giving one to the banker each time, although she’s not sure he drinks them, and in fact they seem to be accumulating on a small round table behind him. But she wants him to keep going; she has never heard anything as rich as his stories, anything as ample or kind or wise. Then Jenny tugs at April P’s wrist. Go away, April P says. No, Jenny says, listen to me. We have to work. Work? April P says. She wants to cry. Work? I’ll talk to you later! she calls out as Jenny pulls her away. The publisher’s assistant, a slim young man in a cornflower-blue shirt, leads them to a barn that has been converted into a home theatre. Many of the guests are waiting for them. They stand in front of these people, and, yes, they take off their clothes. They trot from sofa to sofa, perch on laps, tousle hair, brush hands away, and wait for tips that are not forthcoming. No one has told these people that they have to tip. Finally, they crouch behind the bar and get dressed again. Fucking assholes, Jenny whispers loudly. They storm back to the party, and Jenny goes upstairs to look for something else to steal. April P takes another glass of champagne. She wants to find the old banker in the cardigan, to pick up their conversation and redeem the awful moment, but he has left. She takes another glass of champagne. The party begins to revolve like a carrousel, as if she were on a carrousel, watching the fixed earth go around past her. Someone asks if she is feeling all right. I’m great, she says. She thinks she remembers taking off her clothes again, later in the night. She has a disturbing memory of standing naked in the kitchen, letting someone spray her with water from an industrial dish-sprayer-type thing. Later still, she is in the rose garden, throwing up. The sky is a delicate blue-white. Jenny appears next to her, looking remarkably clean. It’s time to go home, she says. Can you drive? No, April P says. Everyone else seems to have left. There’s just this one guy in an old T-shirt and shorts, trimming the roses. April P assumes that he is the gardener, but it turns out that he’s the famous publisher. Jenny drives her home. April P sleeps all day, and when she wakes up she feels cold and clammy. Even a long hot shower doesn’t help. But when she goes outside her car is parked in the driveway. It, too, has been washed. There’s an envelope on the passenger seat with five hundred dollars in cash and a note from the publisher, thanking her for her time. The note is on creamy paper, with the publisher’s name printed at the top. “This dog is for top salesmen! Only closers get to pet this dog!”Buy the print » After that, April P stops going out with Jenny. She can’t stand Jenny’s friends, because they aren’t rich and never will be. The mere thought of the publisher and his friends makes her sick. She stays in her room and works on “Bar Girl,” which she’s now thinking of calling “April P Bares All.” She fills one yellow legal pad after another with stories from her girlhood. She writes about grown cousins touching her little tits in her mother’s guest bedroom. She writes about a girl she knew in elementary school named Elsa Lundqvist, who was later murdered by a guy she was seeing, whom, it turned out, April P also knew. Valerie told her that writing these stories down would help, and Dara’s self-help books say the same thing. You have to get it out, the books tell her, put it down on paper! But the words she writes do nothing to ease her spirit; they just make her feel stupid and graceless. Notice that we haven’t mentioned the golem for a while. Maybe it got tired of April P and moved on to another club? But the thing about horror stories is that they let you believe life has gone back to normal only in order to surprise you again. And so: one afternoon, April P is scribbling away at her desk when she sees the golem standing at the edge of the forest, a place where, on happier afternoons, she watched deer nibble the grass. She wants to throw up. Is the golem going to follow her everywhere she goes, for the rest of her life? What does it even want? April P tries to keep working, but it turns out to be impossible to write your memoir while a golem is watching you. Hoping that it won’t follow her, she drives to Kingston, and spends a little of the publisher’s money. That’s comfort: not the night sky any longer, but definitely the best outfit in the world. So July passes, and August, too. The golem comes to Dara’s house nearly every day. What it does on its days off April P can only imagine: maybe it stalks another girl, or maybe it goes to the ceramics center and makes little effigies of itself. On Labor Day, April P staggers downstairs around lunchtime to find Dara on the porch, a mug of coffee balanced on one arm of her Adirondack chair and the newspaper on the other. Well, if it isn’t the ghost, Dara says. What have you been doing with yourself? Nothing, April P says. The very question is unfair. April, Dara says, I haven’t wanted to say anything about this, because I respect your privacy, but I kind of suspect that you’re in trouble. Is it drugs? April P shakes her head. I know there’s a lot of that in the sex industry, Dara says. Cocaine and whatnot. I’m not doing drugs, April P says, although there’s nothing she craves more than a hit from her pipe. I want to tell you a story, Dara says, and she does. It’s about Dara as a young woman in New York City, getting drunk and fighting with strangers, sometimes verbally and sometimes physically. One of the strangers breaks Dara’s jaw, and she spends two days in the hospital. She has to eat and drink through a straw, but she gets a friend to bring her a fifth of Jack Daniel’s, which is completely prohibited, not least because Dara is taking both painkillers and antibiotics. When she’s alone in her hospital room, she takes furtive sips from the bottle, using her straw, and at some point while she’s doing this Dara realizes that she is killing herself. So she calls another, better friend, and this friend says, Why don’t you come up to Rosendale? Dara leaves the city. She attends her first A.A. meeting. Her jaw is still wired shut, so she can’t really talk, but she can sure listen. April, Dara concludes, do you need help? I can sponsor you for A.A., if that’s what it is, or if it’s drugs I can find you a sponsor. I know a lot of people in this town. Give us a chance, and we’ll take care of you. At the thought that someone might take care of her, April P sniffles. She tries to make it into a cough, but her eyes tear up. Hey, Dara says, standing. Hey. She circles around behind April P and pats her hair. April P sobs. She wants not to be so afraid and not to have to pretend that she is not so afraid. She cries and cries; snot comes out of her nose, and Dara stands behind her, stroking her hair in a way that she finds strangely comforting. That’s good, Dara says. April, that’s wonderful. She digs her fingers into the muscles at the base of April P’s neck. It feels good, but, too soon, Dara’s fingers communicate a desire to take her shirt off and feel her up. April P wriggles away. Stop, she says. Stop! She stands up, furious. What’s wrong? Dara asks. Don’t touch me! April P screams. Oh, April, Dara says, you really do have a problem. I have a problem? April P says. What about you and your golem? My golem? Dara crinkles up her eyes and looks into the distance behind April P’s shoulder. April P is so spooked that she turns around. There’s nothing. Yes, your golem, Dara, she says. First it came to the club, and now it’s watching me through my bedroom window! It’s driving me fucking crazy! Wow, Dara says. O.K. Let’s take a deep breath. What are you telling me, April? Why don’t you just admit you want to fuck me? April P says. Dara’s face flattens. Are you high? she asks. Not yet, April P says. She grabs her shoes off the porch and runs to her car. That’s more or less the end of April P’s time in Rosendale, although there’s one more incident we should relate. It happens the next day, just before Dara calls Valerie, and Valerie magically arranges for April P to enter the treatment center. That morning, April P wakes up uncharacteristically early. It’s raining, and the house is cold—it’s still summer, technically, but it feels like fall. Dara is out. April P makes coffee. She sits in the living room, trying not to think about anything. Then she sees the golem. It stands right outside the house, its face streaked by the rain that drips from the eaves. April P ignores it. She makes herself comfortable on the sofa and picks up Dara’s copy of “Frankenstein.” She had stopped in the middle; now she reads the monster’s story, and all the sad events that lead up to the final chase across the fields of Arctic ice. When she’s finished, she puts the novel down gently on the coffee table. The golem stands in the same place as before, looking much the worse for wear. Its shoulders sag, and one of its breasts seems to have fallen off. April P goes upstairs. She sits at her desk for a while, looking out at the trees, then opens her journal. And this, for some reason, is easy: April P writes about being in love with a girl whose name is April P. She writes about travelling through the forest to watch April P dance nude at a club full of rowdy unwholesome men, and the heavy pain she feels when April P goes off to a curtained booth where the men are close enough to touch her bare skin. She writes, If only April P commanded me, I would gladly crush the men. I am bigger than any of them, and vastly stronger. I would rip the stage to splinters, mash the tables, smash the chairs, peel back the walls, and tear the roof apart, until nothing remained from which the club could be rebuilt, ever. She writes of the anguish the golem feels as she watches April P drive to the publisher’s party in the hills. If she said the word, I would throw his mansion into the valley and bury it in dirt. I could do it. I am mighty. April P writes about the golem’s rage and bewilderment. All she wants to do is to protect April P; it was for this purpose that she was created. But without a command from April P the golem cannot act. The law of the golem is absolute. After months of this torture, the golem goes to April P’s house. She stands at the edge of the forest and watches April P in her bedroom. What is she doing? the golem wonders. Doesn’t she see me standing here? Why won’t she come out? Day by day, she comes closer to the house, until she stands right outside the window. Incredibly, April P just sits there. She reads a book, she drinks coffee from a chipped blue mug. She adjusts the collar of her bathrobe modestly, which makes the golem want to laugh. April P goes upstairs. The golem can’t see her, but she knows that April P is sitting at her desk, making herself unhappy. The golem doesn’t know what to do. Should she go into the house? Walk up the stairs and tap April P on the shoulder? But the command has to be given freely; it cannot be coerced. Hours pass. The rain becomes torrential, then lets up. The sun appears beyond the clouds. In the forest, a bird starts singing. And then . . . April P puts her pen down. The story came to her so quickly that she can hardly believe it. And yet it’s late in the evening; her shift at the club began hours ago. April P doesn’t care. She wants to show Dara what she has written, but Dara isn’t home yet. She goes downstairs and puts on water for tea. The living-room windows are dark, and she can’t see whether the golem is out there or not. Possessed by a sudden curiosity, April P goes outside. She walks around the house barefoot, her feet chilled by the wet grass. In the light coming from the window, she sees the golem. Its body has been smoothed by the rain until it’s nearly shapeless: not so much a golem as a golem-size lump of clay, dotted with bits of blue and white and orange pottery. Oh, no, April P thinks. She kneels by the lump. She’s still there, kneeling on the lawn in her muddy bathrobe, when Dara gets out of her car, a bag of groceries in her arms. She drops the bag on the porch and runs to April P. Are you all right? she asks. What happened? April P looks up. Her face is wet. Dara, she says, you won’t believe it, but I won! . . . then I hear the front door open. April P circles the house. I want to tell her to put on clothes, because the evening is cold, but I can’t speak yet. I wait by the window, my heart beating (I have a heart) with anticipation. April P comes close, she stands on tiptoe and whispers, Go.

The sun was a wolf. The fanged light had been trailing him for hours, tricky with clouds. As it emerged again from sheepskin, Jack looked down at the pavement, cursed. He’d been walking around since ten, temperature even then close to ninety. The shadow stubs of the telephone poles and his own midget silhouette now suggested noon. He had no hat, and he’d left his sunglasses somewhere, either at Jamie’s or at The Wheel, or they might have slipped off his head. They did that sometimes, when he leaned down to tie his shoes or empty them of pebbles. Pebbles? Was that a word? He stopped to consider it, decided in the negative, and then marched on, flicking his thumb ceaselessly against his index like a Zippo. His nerves were shot, but unable to shut down. No off button now. He’d be zooming for hours, the crackle in his head exaggerated by the racket of birds rucked up in towers of palm, tossing the dry fronds. What were they doing? Ransacking sounds. Looking for nuts or dates, probably. Or bird sex. Possibly bird sex. Maybe he should walk to Rhonda’s, ask her to settle him. Or unsettle him. Maybe he wanted more. Share was what she should do, if she had any. He always shared with her. Not always, but it could be argued. Rhonda was a crusher, though, a big girl, always climbing on top. Her heft was no joke, and Jack was a reed. Still, he loved her. Ha! That was the tweak coming on. He’d never admit to such a thing when he was flat. Now his immortal brain understood. He wanted to marry Rhonda, haul her up the steps of her double-wide, pump out about fifty kids. In the fly-eye of his mind he saw them, curled up like caterpillars on Rhonda’s bed. Jack picked up the pace. The effect of his late-morning tokes was far from finished. Though he’d pulled nothing but dregs (the last of his stash), it was coming on strong, sparking his heart in unexpected ways. So much gratitude. Jack made a fist and banged twice on his chest, thinking of Flaco, a school friend, now dead, who’d first turned him on to this stuff—a precious substance whose unadvertised charm was love. It was infuriating that no one ever mentioned this. The posters, the billboards, the P.S.A.s—all they talked about were skin lesions and rotten teeth. Kids, sadly, were not getting well-rounded information. If Jack hadn’t lost his phone, he’d point it at his face right now and make a documentary. Traffic, a lot of it. On Speedway now, a strip-mall jungle, which, according to his mother, used to be lined with palm trees and old adobes, tamale peddlers and mom-and-pop shops. Not that Jack’s mother was nostalgic. She loved her Marts—the Dollar and the Quik and the Wal. “Cheaper, too,” she said. She liked to buy in bulk, always had extra. Maybe he should go to her place, instead of Rhonda’s, grab some granola bars, a few bottles of water for his pack. Sit on the old yellow couch under the swamp cooler, chew the fat. He hadn’t seen her in weeks. Weeks? Again, the word proved thin, suspect. “Mama,” he said, testing another—an utterance that stopped him in his tracks and caused his torso to jackknife forward. Laughed to spitting. He could picture her face, if he ever tried to call her that. She preferred Bertie. Only sixteen years his senior, she often reminded him. Bertie of the scorched hair, in her sparkle tops and toggle pants. “What’s it short for?” he once asked of her name. She’d told him that his grandfather was a humongous piece of shit, that’s what it was short for. Of course, Jack had never met the famous piece of shit, had only heard stories. Supposedly he and Grandma Shit still lived in Tucson, might be anywhere, two of Jack’s neighbors. He might have passed them on the street, or lent them an egg or a cup of sugar. Jack tittered into his fist. What eggs? What sugar? There was fuck-all in the fridge. In fact, depending on his location, there might not even be a fridge. Buses roared past, their burning flanks throwing cannonballs of heat at the sidewalk. Jack turned away, moved toward himself, a murkier version trapped in the black glass façade of a large building. Twenty-two—he looked that plus ten. Of course, a witch’s mirror was no way to judge. The dark glass was spooked, not to be trusted. Hadn’t Jamie said, only yesterday, in the lamplit corner of the guest bedroom, that Jack looked all of sixteen? “Beautiful,” Jamie had whispered, touching Jack’s cheek. Beautiful. Like something stitched on a pillow, sentimental crap from some other era. The lamplit whisperings had made Jack restless, the dissolved crystal blowing him sideways like a blizzard. To hell with Jamie! Last week, after partying all night, Jack had woken up to find Jamie lying beside him, the man’s hand crawling like a snail across the crotch furrows of Jack’s jeans. Half dead, in deep crash, Jack hadn’t even been sure they were his jeans—the legs inside them looked too skinny, like a kid’s. He’d watched the snail-hand for a good five minutes, feeling nothing—and then, with a gush, he’d felt too much. When he leaped from the bed, Jamie screeched, “Oh my gosh! Oh my gosh!”—apologizing profusely, claiming he’d flailed in his sleep. “Why are you in my bed at all?” Jack had asked, storming into the bathroom with shame-bitten fury. He’d got into the shower, only to find a bar of soap as thin and sharp as a razor blade—scraped himself clean as best he could, until he smelled breakfast coming on hot from the kitchen. It had turned out to be silver-dollar pancakes with whipped cream and chocolate chips. Jack’s favorite. Could the man stoop any lower? Jamie just didn’t add up. A bearded Mexican with a voice like a balloon losing air. Wore pleated slacks, but without a belt you could sometimes glimpse thongs. Didn’t smoke, but blew invisible puffs for emphasis. And the name—Jamie—it sat uncomfortably on the fence, neutered, a child’s name, wrong for anyone over thirty, which Jamie clearly was. Plus he was fat, which made his body indecisive, intricately layered with loose slabs of flesh—potbelly and motherflaps. “Stay with me, why don’t you?” he’d said, for no discernible reason, at the Chevron rest-room sink, where Jack had been rinsing his clotted pipe. That had been a week ago, maybe two. They’d been strangers in that rest room, the obese man appearing out of the gloom of a shit stall. His words, stay with me, had seemed, to the boy, vaguely futuristic, a beam of light from a spaceship. Jack should have known better. The sun drilled the boy’s head, looking for something. He closed his eyes and let the bit work its way to his belly, where the good stuff lived, where the miracle often happened: the black smoke reverting to pure white crystal. A snowflake, an angel. He smiled at himself in the dark glass. It was so easy to forgive those who betrayed you, effortless—like thinking of winter in the middle of July. It cost you nothing. Reflexively Jack scratched deep inside empty pockets, then licked his fingers. The bitch of it was this: forgiveness dissolved instantly on your tongue, there was no time to spit it out. He’d have to remember to speak on this, when he made his documentary. “Welcome to Presto’s!” The blond girl stood just inside the black door, her face gaily frozen, as if cut from the pages of a yearbook. Jack comprehended none of her words. “Welcome,” he replied, attempting a flawless imitation of her birdlike language. Jack was good with foreigners. Most of his school buds had been Chalupas. The girl tilted her head; the smile wavered, but only briefly. Her mouth re-expanded with elastic lunacy. “Ship or print?” Jack was taken aback. Though it was true he needed to use the bathroom, he was disturbed by the girl’s lack of delicacy in regard to bodily functions. “Number one,” he admitted quietly. “Ship?” she persisted. Jack felt dizzy. The girl’s teeth were very large and very white. Jack could only assume they were fake. Keeping his own dental wreckage tucked under blistered lips, he lifted his hands in a gesture of spiritual peace. “I’m just going to make a quick run to the rest room.” “I’m sorry, they’re only for customers.” “George Washington,” Jack blurted, still fascinated by the girl’s massive teeth. “What’s that?” “Cherry tree,” he continued associatively. “Oh, like for the Fourth?” asked Blondie. “Yes,” Jack replied kindly, even though he knew she was confusing Presidents. Fourth of July would be Jefferson or Adams. Jack had always been sweet on History. In school, when he was miniature, he’d got nothing but A’s. Again he sensed the expansiveness of his brain, a maze of rooms, many of which he’d never been in. It didn’t matter that he hadn’t finished high school, there was an Ivy League inside his head, libraries crammed with books. He just needed to pull them from between the folds of gray matter and read them. Close his eyes and get cracking. See, this was the other thing people never told you about meth. It was educational. The girl informed him that there were no holiday specials, if that’s what he was asking about. Jack nodded and smiled, tapping his head in pretense of understanding her logic. As he moved quickly toward the bathroom, the girl skittered off in another direction, also quickly. Perhaps she had to print, too. Or take a ship. Jack giggled, and opened a door leading to a storage closet. “Can I help you?” “Yes,” Jack said to the man inside the closet. “I understand what you’re saying.” “What am I saying?” asked the man. “Perfectly clear,” said Jack. He held up his peace-hands, walked back through the room of humming and spitting machines, and exited the building—behind which he quickly peed, before resuming his trek down Speedway. As soon as he knocked at the trailer door, he was aware of the emptiness in his hands. He should have brought flowers. Or a burrito. He knocked again. Sweat dripped from under his arms, making him feel strangely cold. “I have flowers,” he said to the door. “Go away,” said the door. “I’m not talking to a door,” said Jack. “I don’t take orders from doors.” “You can’t be here. Why are you here?” The voice was exhausted, cakey. Jack could picture the pipe. “Baby,” he said. “Come on. Why are you being stingy?” “I’ll call the police, I swear to God.” Jack was silent, but stood his ground. He scratched at the door like a cat. After a while, someone said, “Please.” The word sounded funny, like a flute. Jack tried saying it again. Even worse. It almost sounded as if he were going to cry. “Don’t let it slam.”Buy the print » When the door opened, it did so only a few inches—most of Rhonda’s mouth obscured by a chain. “You cannot be here, Jack.” Jack, who was clearly there, only smiled. “I’m O.K.,” he assured her. “You look like shit,” said Rhonda. “Sunburn,” theorized Jack. “It’s like a hundred and twenty out here.” He could barely see the girl—or he could see her, just not recognize her. She seemed different, her hair and her clothes fussed up, neat. He smelled no smoke, only perfume. “What’s going on?” he asked, flicking his thumb. Rhonda made an irritated snort, half laugh, half fart. It seemed to come from her mouth. Jack, confident he was at the peak of his charm, refused to be put off. “Can you just open the door, so that we can talk like humans, without the frickin’ mustache?” “The what?” “The . . . ” Jack gestured swoopily toward the door. “The frickin’ . . . ” “Chain?” suggested Rhonda. “All I want is, like, hello, O.K.? Like hello, whatever, a glass of water.” The girl grimaced dramatically, egging on Jack’s own sense of tragedy. “I am literally dying, Rhonda.” Jack pressed his face into the door crack, letting the cool air caress his skin. His eyes, blinded from sunlight, barely took in the fact that the girl was gone. After a moment, he heard water running in the sink, the clink of a glass being pulled from a cupboard. He closed his eyes, felt a stirring between his legs. Rhonda had always been so kind. “I don’t need ice,” he called out. “Good. Here you go.” At first Jack wasn’t sure what it was. The water thrown in his face was cold. It dripped down his neck and into his shirt, slow trails across his belly. It lingered, drifted lower, like a kind of kiss. Jack licked his lips: the tap water salty, mixed with his sweat. Something was humming, too—the bones under his cheeks, near his eyes, vibrating like a tuning fork or an organ at the back of a church. “Don’t cry,” he said to Rhonda, who said she wasn’t. “Why would I be crying after a fucking year?” Jack said, “What year?”—to which Rhonda replied, “I thought you were dead.” She wasn’t making a whole lot of sense. Jack asked if she was going fast. “Are you insane?” said Rhonda. “Those were the worst two months of my life.” “Why don’t I come in and we’ll take a nap?” suggested Jack. “Listen to me,” the girl said. “You have to lose this address—do you hear me?” Jack ran a hand over his wet face. “Please,” begged Rhonda. “You have to go. Eric will be home soon.” Jack wondered if she meant Jack, since the names were so similar. “Do you mean me?” he asked in earnest. He tried to find the girl’s eyes—and when he did he saw that she wasn’t a girl at all. She was old, practically as old as Bertie. What was more astonishing, though, was the look on her face. There was no love in it whatsoever. “I don’t know you,” said Jack. “Good,” said Rhonda, shutting the door. He stood on some gravel, and felt terrible. Even the little plank of shadow beside the cement wall held no appeal. Were he to lie there, he’d only get the jits. Walking was what he needed, and to hell with the sun. That’s what people in his position did. They walked, they moved, they got things done. Sitting was no good. Talking was fine, if you had someone. Sex was primal. Jack’s body knew the rules. There were any number of ways to keep one’s brain from exploding. People going fast rearranged the furniture, or crawled around looking for carpet crumbs. Anything that used your hands, which, compelled by the imaginative fervor of your mind, became tools in a breathless campaign to change the shape of the world. It was art, essentially. Jack wondered why more people going fast didn’t do crafts. He suddenly wished for construction paper and Elmer’s glue; glitter, cotton, clay. Once, when he was little, he’d made a kick-ass giraffe from a walnut and some toilet-paper tubes. The legs, ingeniously, had been chopsticks. Bertie used to leave them for hours, on the days she attended her meetings. She’d always made sure there were coloring books and Play-Doh, carrot sticks and DVDs. Little notes saying Love and Be back soon. Jack and his sister had in no way been deprived. His sister? Fuck. His sister. She came back to him like sheet lightning. He hadn’t seen Lisa since she’d gone away. He clapped his hands, to banish the thought. It was almost funny how, at certain elevations, it was so easy to pretend you didn’t know things you could never forget. Jack dug for his phone, to see if he had Lisa’s number. But, being that there was no phone, he pulled up only lint—which he quickly dismissed, into the air, with a puff. He watched it float for a moment, fluttering with indecision, before it drifted down, in a slow sashay, and landed on his shoe. “Fine,” said Jack. “Fine!” He picked up the gray fluff, and stuffed it back in his pocket. Walked around the block to see if he could trick it. He’d done it before. Pull one over on time. Circle back and confuse it. Like one of those Aborigines. They were big walkers, too. Ugly fuckers, but the cool thing was they could walk a thousand miles, no problem—and they weren’t trying to get to China or some shit like that. What they wanted was to get back to their ancestors—way the fuck past Grandma and Grandpa, all the way back to the lizards and the snakes. Jack, of course, would have been satisfied with a smaller victory—finding his way back five, six years, to Bertie’s crumbling adobe. “Star Trek” and pizza with Lisa. Hell, he’d be fine with getting back to just last year, to the old Rhonda, the Rhonda of the bra-welted back and the cream-cheese thighs, the sad girl he’d met at The Wheel, and whom he’d made happy with snowflakes and black clouds. Had it really been a year? Jack felt nervous now, flicked his thumb even faster, sensed his shadow growing longer, trailing him like gum stuck to his shoe. Soon, he knew, the freak would come, the soul-suck, if he didn’t get one of two things: more crystal or a sound sleep—both of which would require money, because sleep, at this point, wouldn’t be free. It would cost a bottle of grain or a six-pack or a pill. Sometimes he wondered why a person couldn’t just hit himself over the head with a rock. He climbed on top of the gas meter and opened the window, as he’d done a million times before. A small, high window, facing the alley. Lisa’s window, which Bertie never locked. A tight fit, even for a skinny drink like Jack. Halfway through, he found himself stuck, but with a series of wriggling bitch-in-heat motions he managed to make it through, head first, onto the dusty shrine of his sister’s neatly made bed. The friction of passing through the small opening, though, had pulled down his pants, as well as given him an erection. When he stood to hoist his jeans, a young woman in yoga tights entered the room, dropped a pear, and screamed. Jack, thinking the pear was some sort of grenade, covered his head, leaving his erection exposed. The woman moved quickly to the bureau and grabbed a bead-encrusted candlestick that Lisa had made in sixth grade. Jack, watching the drama through smoke-scented fingers, calmed, seeing the familiar prop. Plus, the grenade, bearing teeth marks, was obviously a ruse. “I’m not here to hurt you,” said Jack—a comment that, judging by the woman’s anguished face, failed to impart the cordiality he wished to convey. The woman squealed and fled the room. “I just want to see Bertie,” Jack called out, pulling up his pants. “I’m her son. I’m Jack.” The idea of having to explain his existence exhausted him. When he walked into the living room, the woman was still clutching the candlestick—a lathe-turned beauty, to which Lisa had glued hundreds of tiny red beads. Jack had lent her the epoxy himself, a leftover tube from one of his build-it-yourself dinosaur sets. “You can put that down,” said Jack. “Look,” said the woman, “Beatrice isn’t here. She won’t be back for a while.” “Who?” “You’re looking for your mother?” Jack felt a peculiar flutter in his gut. “I’m meeting her in a—in a bit,” stammered the woman. “I’ll just—I’ll let her know you were here.” “What did you call her?” asked Jack. The woman took a step back. “Nothing. What?” “Her name,” Jack stated as calmly as possible, “is Bertie.” “Well, that’s not how I know her,” said the woman in yoga tights, who, even with the upraised candlestick, seemed to smile, a quick flash of arrogance. “I can see your vulva,” said Jack. The woman covered her crotch with the candlestick. “My God, do you even know what you’re saying?” “It’s inappropriate is all I’m saying,” replied Jack, strolling over to the yellow couch. He sat at the far right, where the air of the swamp cooler always hit you square in the face. As kids, he and Lisa used to fight over this spot. “Fifteen minutes each,” Bertie used to say, making them share the luxury equally. “Otherwise I’ll shut the damn thing off.” Frickin’ Solomon, that was his mother all right. A part-time Christian with a gutter mouth. Beatrice? For fucking real? How could Jack not have known this—or, more important, why had this information been kept from him? “I don’t think you know what you’re talking about,” he said to the woman. But she wasn’t listening. She was on the telephone, giving an address Jack recognized. He made a blah-blah-blah gesture with his hand, as the woman prattled into the phone. Why did no one wish to have a legitimate exchange with him? He was a good person, a personable person, a person with a heart the size of a fucking bullfrog. Couldn’t the woman in yoga tights understand that there was no need to involve the police? “I live here,” said Jack. The woman said, “Thank you,” and hung up the phone. “I’ve called the—” “I know,” interrupted Jack. He crossed his legs, willing himself to stay calm. Anyway, it would take them at least ten minutes to get here. This wasn’t a Zip Code anyone rushed to, especially the cops. “Do you want to get arrested?” the woman asked. “I mean, do you want to be like this?” “Like what?” asked Jack. “Do you realize how much pain you’ve caused Beatrice?” “Who are you, exactly?” Jack had the thought to have Yoga Tights arrested when the police arrived. “How do you even know my mother?” “We’re roommates,” the woman articulated with unnecessary aggression. Jack had a vision of pillow fights, s’mores, backrubs. “Disgusting,” he said. “What’s disgusting?” “It’s sad, but it’s not laugh-out-loud sad.”Buy the print » Jack didn’t reply—glass houses and all. He might as well be talking about himself and Jamie. He stood, annoyed, and walked over to the mirrored cabinet in the corner of the room. It seemed distinctly smaller than it had when he was little, like a toy version of the real thing. He knelt before it, turned the silver latch, opened the doors. He stared inside, uncomprehendingly (What the fuck?), pushed around envelopes and stamps, a pile of old phone bills. He shoved his hands to the far back. Not even a bottle of Tio Pepe or crème de menthe. “We don’t keep any in the house,” the woman said. Jack scowled. He knew Bertie better than that. “In case you care to know, your mother is doing really well.” Wonderful! thought Jack. Applause! He stood, dusted himself off regally, as if he might dismiss the increeping panic. “I just need to get a few bottles of water.” In the kitchen, in the pantry, he pulled the cord, turned on the light. Well stocked, as usual. For Judgment Day, Bertie had always been prepared. With food, if not with mercy. “I can’t be held responsible,” Bertie liked to say. In a more generous mood, everything was God’s plan, God’s doing. Jack took six bottles of water and ten granola bars, stuffed them into his pack. “Help yourself, why don’t you?” the woman said. Unbelievable. Un-fucking-believable. Jack turned to her. She was standing in the doorway, still holding the candlestick. “Do you even know who that belongs to? Do you even know who made that?” But the woman had no interest in discussing the relics of Jack’s childhood. “Just take what you want and go,” she said. “Beatrice would probably be pissed anyway, if I got you arrested. I don’t know why she should be, though. You’ve been a very toxic influence on her.” She shook her head, puffing air bullishly from her nose. “Everyone at Fellowship thinks so, too, but your mother is, like, deluded.” The woman moved the candlestick from one hand to the other. Jack looked at her hard, just to make sure she wasn’t Lisa. No one really knew what Lisa looked like these days. You could always tell by the eyes, though—and when Jack looked at those he knew that Yoga Tights was not his sister. “You’re not even a very good replacement,” he said. “Replacement for what?” she asked. But Jack did not deign to answer. He zipped his pack and, without even bothering to take the loose change visible on the counter, scurried out the back door. He cut through neighbors’ yards to avoid running into the cops. He leaped over stones, over crevices, over brown lawns and tiny quicksilver lizards. His speed exhilarated him, and then made him feel distinctly ill. When he finally heard the sirens, he was three blocks away, in an alley frilly with trash. He lurched to a stop, sending up clouds of dust. A dry wind blew grit into his eye. Fuck. He needed an improvement in his itinerary, like immediately. But he had no leverage. Not even two bucks for the bus. He should have taken the coins from Bertie’s kitchen. Probably no more than a dollar, but a dollar was enough to get started. Four quarters in a newspaper lockbox and you could steal the lot, sell them from some busy intersection. Old-school, but it worked—even if, sometimes, it took five hours to make five bucks. “What’s that?” Jack said to his stomach, which was mumbling something vague but insistent. He fed it a granola bar, and immediately vomited. Drank some water. Vomited again. Dirt, weeds, a huge prickly pear like a coral reef. Jack covered his burning head with his T-shirt, exposing his belly. Why hadn’t the Founding Fathers planted more shade trees out here? Probably because the bastards had never made it this far west. The only people who’d ventured this far, back then, were derelicts and thieves. Uprooted types, not prone to plant things. Jack was leaning philosophically against a fence for several minutes before he spotted the dog, sleeping on the other side. Not a pit, just some big floppy collie. Still, it reminded him of Lisa. How could an animal sleep in this heat with all that fur? Jack knelt in the alley, winding his fingers through the chain-link. “Psst.” Rattled the fence. “Hey! Buster!” The dog opened one eye, too stunned to get up. Shook a leg epileptically. “You’re just gonna lie there?” Piles of dried shit everywhere, like a miniature wigwam village. Again Jack rattled the fence. “What are you doing? Why are you bothering him?” A little man with a lopsided beard, like a paintbrush that had dried crooked, appeared at a window. “I’m not bothering him,” said Jack. “I thought he was someone else.” “He’s a dog,” said the man. “He ain’t got nothing to do with you.” Jack, riled, was ready to argue the point, but then let it go. He could see that the man was old, and so was the dog. Besides, his mouth was dry, and as he tried to get up his legs buckled. The man snapped his fingers in Jack’s direction. “No funny business!” Jack nodded and backed away. “I’m going.” He walked about ten feet before he stopped, opened his backpack, and pulled out another granola bar—which he quickly unwrapped and tossed over the fence. “Get up for that, I bet.” The dog didn’t hesitate. “I thought so,” said Jack. Instantly, though, the old man shot from the back door and pulled the food from the dog’s mouth. “It’s not poison!” shouted Jack. “It’s granola!” A firecracker went off in the distance, and Jack turned. Next time, he thought, I’ll do that—stick a firecracker in the damn granola. For years, he’d hated every dog, and experienced a paralyzing weakness in their presence. Now, despite the occasional flash of cruel intention, Jack’s anger had mostly turned into something else. A dog, any dog, was like the relentless sunshine: mind-alteringly sad. Jack sat on the curb, touched his hand to blazing macadam. Sometimes it could be burned out of you—the pain. But no, the past was here, before him now like a mirage, wavering with tiny figures, holograms he recognized. Resistance is futile, the Borg say. Because not only had he run into a dog; he’d run out of his stash as well—and running out of crystal was like running out of time, sinking back into the mud that was your life. No dusting of white snow to prettify the view. With a mad, flea-scratching intensity, Jack scraped out the stem of his pookie, but what fell from it was worthless: a few flakes of irredeemable tar. The holograms grew to full size, and came closer. “Grrr,” said Jack, hoping he didn’t sound like an animal. Jack had been with his sister that day—a summer morning, playing Frisbee in a field. The Frisbee had gone over a fence. The dog was black, not huge, the size of a twenty-gallon ice chest. After the attack, Jack wondered if they’d really killed it. The police had used the words put to sleep, but Jack had worried that the owners might have somehow woken the animal up, and were hiding it inside their house. Lisa’s fears, no doubt, had been far worse—but Jack had known better than to ask her. Anyway, Lisa couldn’t really talk after it happened. She had a lot of problems with her jaw. With everything, really. Her right hand was so nerve-damaged that she had to use her left, which she never got very good at. She shook a lot, refused to eat, mostly drank smoothies. Her pinkie was missing. Her face, though, was the worst. Even after two surgeries, it looked like something badly made, lumpy—as if a child had made it out of clay. It was less a face than the idea of one, preliminary, a sketch—but careless, with terrible proportions, and slightly skewed; primitive—a face that might be touching in art, but in life was hideous. “Look at that!” Bertie had shouted at the lawyer, showing him pictures of what Lisa had looked like before. “Beautiful. And this is what they’re saying she’s worth?” The settlement had not been much. “An outrage,” Bertie said to anyone who would listen. She tried to get another lawyer to take on the case. Jack would sit with his mother in cluttered offices, staring at the floor, telling the suits what he’d seen. “Happens every seven seconds,” one lawyer said with disturbing enthusiasm, as if discussing the odds of winning the lottery. “Plus, you know how people in Tucson love their Rotts and their pits.” Unfortunately, he explained, a jackpot settlement was usually tied to an attack catching the right wave of publicity. “Your moment has probably passed,” he said with a wince, a shrug. “That baby,” Bertie would complain, referring to what she considered Lisa’s competition. The same summer, a two-year-old had been mauled near Sabino Canyon. There’d been a fund-raising campaign. “Foothills,” Bertie had scoffed, after seeing the child’s parents on television, their big house on a ridge. “As if they need help! We should start our own campaign,” she’d muttered, after a sip, to Jack. “We could make posters,” he’d suggested sheepishly. “Posters, TV commercials, the whole shebang.” His mother pulled more deeply from her Captain Morgan mug, the ice clinking like money inside a piggy bank. “Wanna make them pop, though,” she said of the posters. “Need to get us some big-ass pieces of paper.” It would have been easy. Jack was artistic (everyone said so), and Bertie had balls. But, in the end, they’d never done a thing; never called a TV station or decorated a coffee can with ribbons and a picture of Lisa’s face. Never took the case back to court—even though it was clear, after the initial surgeries, that Lisa would require more. The procedures couldn’t be rushed, though. The doctor had recommended that Lisa wait before going back under the knife: “Too much trauma already. Let’s see how the current work heals.” What little remained of the settlement money was kept in a separate account, like a vacation fund or a Christmas club, some perverse dowry. Money for the future, earmarked for surgery. Jack had helped, at some point, hadn’t he? Standing at the edge of the alley, he scratched his leg—a vague recollection that he’d given Lisa some of his own skin. It had been more compatible than Bertie’s. In the fall, Lisa had refused to go back to school for her junior year. She mostly stayed inside, in her bedroom. There was a lot of pain medication—which was apparently, Jack learned, something to be shared. “I’m in pain, too,” Bertie had cried, defensively, when he caught her one night with the bottle. “Anyway,” she chided, changing the subject, “your sister can’t live in a fog for the rest of her life. She needs to get a job.” Jack didn’t understand why a person in Lisa’s position couldn’t be allowed to stay inside, in a dark bedroom, for the rest of her life. Bertie had a thing, though, about self-improvement and positive thinking, which often made her children shrink from her as if she were a terrorist. “I’m glad to see that almost everyone has been taking advantage of the new executive fitness center.”Buy the print » Amazingly, Lisa had found a job fairly quickly, full time at a telemarketing firm. “You see,” Bertie had chirped. “Up and at ’em,” practically shoving Lisa out the door, her hair strategically feathered over her cheeks. “Minimum wage,” Lisa said, and Bertie replied that there was no shame in that. All day, Lisa had sat in a cubicle, talked on the phone in her new, funny voice. But maybe, thought Jack, the people his sister called just assumed she had a toothache, or an accent. No one on the phone would have known that his sister was a high-school dropout in Tucson—or that she’d been mutilated. That was a word no one had used—not the doctors or Lisa’s friends or even the truth-obsessed women from Bertie’s so-called church. No one ever said maimed, destroyed, ruined. Bitten, people preferred to say, modestly, as if Lisa’s misfortune had been the work of an ant, or a fly. Jack rubbed his eye, swatted his cheek. As he headed downtown in long, loping strides, his body was dangerously taut, a telephone wire stretched between time zones. He needed to bring his thinking back to 2000-whatever-the-fuck-it-was—this day, this street. “Excuse me,” he said to a woman with a briefcase and praying-mantis sunglasses—but, before he could explain his purpose, she darted away and leaped into a black sedan. The woman obviously had issues; even from inside the vehicle, she was waving her hands at him in extreme sign language: no tengo no tengo no tengo. After an hour and a half, he’d managed to assemble two dollars (a few quarters from a laundromat, a few obtained by outright begging). When he climbed on the bus and dropped the coins in the chute, they made a sound like a slot machine promising a payout. “What are you waiting for?” asked the driver. “Nothing,” mumbled Jack, taking a seat at the back. He’d been looking forward to the air-conditioning, but now it made him shake—the cold air, like pins on his face. Sometimes he’d met Lisa after her shift, to accompany her home. She hadn’t liked to take the bus alone. She’d wanted Jack to ride with her in the mornings as well—but how could he? He was fifteen; he had school. Anyway, the afternoons were enough. The walk to the back of the bus had always seemed to take a lifetime. People stared, kids laughed. Lisa never said anything, but sometimes she took Jack’s hand, which embarrassed him: what if people thought she was his girlfriend? Sometimes he could hear her breathing; sometimes, a sound in her throat like twigs snapping. That same year, Jack met Flaco. The first time they went fast together, in Flaco’s enamel-black bedroom, it was like, oh yes—total understanding, total big picture, all the nagging little details washed away. Soon Jack stopped meeting Lisa after work. He let her take the bus alone, with nothing but her feathered hair to protect her; her head drooping like a dead flower; a white glove on her right hand like Michael Jackson, the pinkie stuffed with cotton. It was O.K., though. Because the funny thing was, he’d been able to love her more, and with less effort, from a distance. He felt that by going fast he was actually helping Lisa, he was helping all of them. He was building a white city out of crystal, inside his heart. When it was finished, there’d be room for everyone. For the first time in his life Jack had understood Bertie’s nonsense about positive thinking, about taking responsibility for your own life. After Jack met Flaco, there were nights he didn’t come home at all. Sometimes their flights lasted for days. Bertie might have complained, but she, too, was spending more and more time at her meetings. It was no surprise when Lisa said she was going away. “Away? Where could you possibly go?” cried Bertie. Lisa said she’d heard there was a good doctor in Phoenix; she’d start there. “For how long?” Bertie had asked—and, when Lisa didn’t answer—“And I suppose you plan on taking the money with you?” “It is mine,” said Lisa. No one could argue with that. Jack pulled the cord, made his way to the rear exit of the bus. The door opened with a life-support hiss. Whiplash of light coming off a skyscraper. Jack held up his hand to block the sun’s reflection, a roundish blur of ghostly ectoplasm that hovered somewhere around the twentieth floor—which the boy’s street sense interpreted, correctly, as roughly five o’clock. Please be over soon, he thought, knowing full well that the day would linger for hours yet. Even after sunset, the heat would be terrible—the sidewalks, the streets, the buildings, radiating back the fire they’d absorbed all day. There’d be no relief until well after midnight. Jack walked south, toward the barrio, toward the sound of firecrackers, the whistle of bottle rockets. Later, at dark, the neon pompoms would come—the big holiday displays at the foothills resorts, and the city-sponsored show on Sentinel Peak, which half the time had to be stopped due to the scrub catching on fire. From the valley, you could watch the flames flowing down the mountain like lava. People looked forward to that as much as to the fireworks. Jack walked with no particular purpose, and was surprised when he found himself standing before Flaco’s house. There was the white storybook fence around the neatly swept yard; the saint with her garland of artificial flowers, standing on a lake of tinfoil. At the Virgin’s feet, a weird mix of things: playing cards and plastic beads, and what looked like pieces of old bread. Jack had always loved this diorama, which lived inside a little cage like a chicken coop. To protect it from the rain, Flaco’s mother had explained. He wondered if she’d still recognize him, maybe give him some carne seca wrapped in a tortilla as thin as tissue paper. In so many ways, his life had started in this house. A thousand hopes and dreams. Jack wondered if they were still in there, inside Flaco’s spray-painted bedroom. Wondered, too, if there might be any crystal left in one of the old hiding spots. Five years was a long time, though. Someone would already have smoked it, or flushed it down the drain. And, besides, Jack didn’t have the stamina to crawl through another window. He was done with windows and doors. He half considered climbing inside the chicken coop with the saint. The sadness bloomed in his belly. It always started there—a radioactive flower, chaotic, spinning out in weird fractals until it found its way to his arms and legs, his quivering lips. Then the telltale buzz of electricity in his hair. See, this was the reason it was better to go fast with another person—so that, when you crashed, you weren’t alone. The high, too, was better when shared. Sometimes he and Flaco, as a team, could increase the effect of the drugs, pinballing around the bedroom, generating so much heat they could barely stand the feel of their clothing. Often they’d ripped off their shirts, lain next to each other on the bed, watched in amazement as their words turned into flames, rose into the air like rockets. Flaco—and this was something Jack wished to mention in his documentary—Flaco had not died from crystal. It had been something else, something stupid, a car. Walking away from the imprisoned saint, Jack passed old women putting lawn chairs along the street, claiming spots. Brujas in flowered smocks and slappy flip-flops, some with brooms, territorial. Later, they’d sit there with glasses of watermelon juice and watch the fireworks, the burning mountain. Farther south now, past Birrieria Guadalajara, where he and Flaco used to eat everything, even tongue. Lengua. Words no longer seemed chimeric to Jack, no longer seemed approximations for something else. They were earthbound now, which was what happened when you were sober. Jack clenched his fists—untrimmed nails digging into his flesh. All he wanted was to find a safe place before the blooms made a mess of the sky. He stopped at the railroad tracks. Stopped right between the iron rails, kicked aside some trash, and sat. In his dark jeans, his dirt-brown shirt, they might not even see him. “Ow,” he said, because of the stones as he lay down. While the sun cooked him, he became aware of how dirty he was. He could smell himself, even a slight tang of shit. Disgusting. His breath stank—and his stomach was bubbling, an ungodly flatulence from a diet of protein bars and black smoke. It was understandable why others would despise him. Most people lived their entire lives straight, and had no ability whatsoever to see through surfaces—unlike Jack, who’d been schooled in crystal, and who understood how easy it was to forgive. Who knew if Lisa forgave him? He hoped she didn’t. He was the one who’d thrown the Frisbee over the fence, a total spaz, missing Lisa by a mile. She’d pulled a face and told him to go get it. “You’re closer,” he’d shouted back. “You get it.” Jack turned his head, to see if he could spot the train. Flicker of distant traffic: metal and glass. Lost saguaros, catatonic, above which birds drifted in slow circles, like pieces of ash. To the east, the mountains, shrouded in dust, were all but invisible. The train would come eventually, the crazy quilt of boxcars, the fractious whistle. Oh, but it was so boring waiting for death! Jack had come to the tracks before. When the signal light began to flash, he jumped up. He wasn’t an idiot. Besides, he couldn’t help himself; his sadness was like a river, carrying him home. “You don’t like your life, make up another one.” Something Bertie used to say. Her children had, in the end, listened to her. Jack kept running, and when he got to Jamie’s he didn’t knock; he walked right in, sat at the table. It wasn’t long before Jamie came into the kitchen in his phony orange kimono (“Mijo! Mijo!”), flapping his arms, flushing, like something out of a Mexican soap opera. And though Jack didn’t laugh, he remembered the part of himself that had—and not so long ago. Still, he flinched when the man tried to touch his face. In the silence that followed, Jamie began to smile. “What?” said Jack—and Jamie said, “I’m just looking at you.” “Why?” “Do I need a reason?” Jack shrugged, evasive. “I’m sort of hungry.” “Well,” Jamie said grandly, “you’re dealing with an expert on that subject. The only question is: animal, vegetable, or mineral?” This last word sugarcoated, singsong. Jack looked up, hopefully. “Yes, mijo.” Jamie patted the pocket of his kimono. “I do I do I do.” “I do,” repeated Jack, feeling his heart leap straight into the man’s fat little hand.

From the ditch behind the house, Kate could see her husband up at the old forestry hut, where mottled scrubland gave way to dense lines of trees. “Colman!” she called, but he didn’t hear. She watched him swing the axe in a clean arc and thought that from this distance he could be any age. Lately, she’d found herself wondering what he’d been like as a very young man, a man of twenty. She hadn’t known him then. He had already turned forty when they met. It was early April, the fields and ditches coming green again after winter. Grass verges crept outward, thickening the arteries of narrow lanes. “There’s nothing wrong,” she shouted when she was still some yards off. He was in his shirtsleeves, his coat discarded on the grass beside him. “Emer rang from London. She’s coming home.” He put down the axe. “Home for a visit, or home for good?” He had dismantled the front of the hut and one of the side walls. On the floor inside, if floor was the word, she saw empty beer cans, blankets, a ball of blackened tinfoil. “Just for a few days. A friend from college has an exhibition. I wasn’t given much detail. You know Emer.” “Yes,” he said, and frowned. “When is she arriving?” “Tomorrow evening, and she’s bringing Oisín.” “Tomorrow? And she’s only after ringing now?” “It’ll be good to have them stay. Oisín has started school since we last saw him.” She waited to see if he might mention the room, but he picked up the axe, as if impatient to get back to work. “What will we do if the Forestry Service come round?” she said. “They haven’t come round this past year. They don’t come round when we ring about the drinking or the fires.” He swung the axe at a timber beam supporting what was left of the roof. There was a loud splintering but the beam stood firm, and he drew back the axe, prepared to strike again. She turned and walked toward the house. The Dennehys, their nearest neighbors, had earlier that week sown maize, and a crow hung from a pole, strung up by a piece of twine. It lifted in the wind as she walked past, coming to rest again a few feet from the ground, above the height of foxes. When they first moved here, she hadn’t understood that the crows were real, shot specially for the purpose, and had asked a discomfited Mrs. Dennehy what cloth she sewed them from. After supper, she took the duvet cover with the blue Teddy bears from the hot press and spread it out on the kitchen table. There were matching pillowcases and a yellow pajama holder in the shape of a rabbit. Colman was on the other side of the kitchen, making a mug of Bovril. “What do you think?” she said. “Lovely.” “You couldn’t possibly see from that distance,” she said. “It’s the same one as before, isn’t it?” “Well, yes,” she said. “But it’s a while since they visited. I’m wondering, is it a bit babyish?” “You’re not going to find another between now and tomorrow,” he said, and she felt the flutter in her eyelid start up, the one that usually preceded a headache. She had hoped the sight of the duvet cover might prompt an offer to move his stuff, or at least the suggestion that she could move it, but he just drank his Bovril and rinsed the mug, setting it upside down on the draining board. “Good night,” he said, and went upstairs. Next morning, she started with his suits. She waited until he’d gone outside, then carried them from John’s old room to their bedroom, across the landing. The wardrobe there had once held everything, but now when she pushed her coats and dresses along the rail they resisted, swung back at her, jostling and shouldering, as if they’d been breeding and fattening this past year. For an hour she went back and forth between the rooms with clothes, shoes, books. The winter before last, Colman had brought the lathe in from the shed and set it up in their son’s old bedroom. It had been a gift from the staff at the Co-op on his retirement as manager. He would turn wood late into the night, and often, when she put her head around the door in the morning, she would find him, still in his clothes, asleep on John’s old single bed. There began then the gradual migration of his belongings. He appeared to have lost interest in the lathe—he no longer presented her with lamps or bowls—but for the better part of a year he had not slept in their bedroom at all. Colman had allowed junk to accumulate—magazines, spent batteries, a cracked mug on the windowsill. She got a sack and went around the room, picking things up. The lathe and wood-turning tools—chisels, gouges, knives—were on a desk in the corner, and she packed them away in a box. She put aside Colman’s pajamas and dressed the bed with fresh linen, the blue Teddy bears jolly on the duvet, the rabbit propped on a chair alongside. Standing back to admire it, she noticed Colman in the doorway. He had his hands on his hips and was staring at the sack. “I haven’t thrown anything out,” she said. “Why can’t the child sleep in the other room?” He went over to the sack, dipped a hand in, and took out a battery. “Emer’s room? Because Emer will be sleeping there.” “Can’t he sleep there, too?” She watched him drop the battery back into the sack and root around, a look of expectancy on his face, like a boy playing lucky dip. He brought out the cracked mug, polished it on his trousers, and then, to her exasperation, put it back on the windowsill. “He’s six,” she said. “He’s not a baby anymore. I want things to be special. We see so little of him.” It was true, she thought, it was not a lie. And then, because he was staring at her, she said, “And I don’t want Emer asking about . . . ” She paused, spread her arms wide to encompass the room. “About this.” For a moment he looked as if he were going to challenge her. It would be like him, she thought, to decide to have this conversation today, today of all days, when he wouldn’t have it all year. But he picked up his pajamas and a pair of shoes she had missed beneath the bed and, saying nothing, headed across the landing. Later, she found his pajamas folded neatly on the pillow on his side of the bed, where he always used to keep them. Colman was on the phone in the hall when the car pulled up in front of the house. Kate hurried out and was surprised to see a man in the driver’s seat. Emer was in the passenger seat, her hair blacker and shorter than Kate remembered. “Hi, Mam,” she said, getting out and kissing her mother. She wore a red tunic, the bodice laced up with ribbon like a folk costume, and black trousers tucked into red boots. She opened the back door of the car and the child jumped out. He was small for six, pale and sandy-haired. “Say hi to your granny,” Emer said, and she pushed him forward. Kate felt tears coming, and she hugged the child close and shut her eyes so as not to confuse him. “Goodness,” she said, stepping back to get a better look, “you’re getting more and more like your Uncle John.” The boy stared at her blankly. She ruffled his hair. “You wouldn’t remember him,” she said. “He lives in Japan now. You were very small when you met him, just a baby.” The driver’s door opened and the man got out. He was slight and sallow-skinned, in a navy sports jacket and round, dark-rimmed glasses. One foot dragged a little as he came round the side of the car, plowing a shallow furrow in the gravel. Kate had been harboring a hope that he was the driver, that any moment Emer would take out her purse and pay him, but he put a hand on her daughter’s shoulder and she watched Emer turn her head to nuzzle his fingers. He was not quite twice Emer’s age, but he was close—late forties, she guessed. Kate waited for Emer to make the introductions, but she had turned her attention to Oisín, who was struggling with the zip of his hoodie. “Pavel,” the man said, and, stepping forward, he shook her hand. Then he opened the boot and took out two suitcases. “I’ll give you a hand with those,” Colman said, appearing at the front door. He wrested both cases from Pavel and carried them into the house, striding halfway down the hall before coming to a halt. He put the suitcases down beside the telephone table and stood with his hands in his pockets. The others stopped, too, forming a tentative circle at the bottom of the stairs. “Oisín,” Emer said, “say hello to your grandad. He’s going to take you hunting in the forest.” The boy’s eyes widened. “Bears?” he said. “No bears,” Colman said, “but we might get a fox or two.” Pavel shuffled his feet on the carpet. “Oh, Daddy,” Emer said, as if she’d just remembered, “this is Pavel.” Pavel held out a hand, and Colman delayed for a second before taking it. “Pleased to meet you,” he said, and he lifted the cases again. “I’ll show you to your rooms.” Kate remained in the hall and watched them climb the stairs, Colman in front, the others following behind. Pavel was new, she thought; the child was shy with him, sticking close to his mother, one hand clutching her tunic. Colman set a suitcase down outside Emer’s old bedroom. He pushed open the door, and from the foot of the stairs Kate watched her daughter and grandson disappear into the garish, cluttered room, its walls hung with canvases Emer had painted during her goth phase. Colman carried the other suitcase to John’s old room. “And this is your room,” she heard him say to Pavel as she went into the kitchen to make tea. “How long is he on the scene?” Colman said when he came back downstairs. “Don’t look at me like that,” she said. “I don’t know any more than you do.” He sat at the table, drumming his fingers on the oilcloth. “What class of a name is Pavel, anyway?” he said. “Is it Eastern European or what? Is it Lithuanian? What is it?” Buy the print » She debated taking out the china, but, deciding it was old-fashioned, went for the pottery mugs instead. “I expect we’ll hear later,” she said, arranging biscuits on a plate. “She shouldn’t have landed him in on top of us like this, with no warning.” “No,” Kate said, “she shouldn’t have.” She found the plastic beaker she’d bought for Oisín’s last visit two Christmases ago. It was decorated with puffy-chested robins and snowflakes. She polished it with a tea towel and put it on the table. “Every time I see Oisín,” she said, “he reminds me of John. Even when he was a baby in his pram he looked like John. I must get down the photo album and show Emer.” Colman wasn’t listening. “Are we supposed to ask about the other fellow at all now?” he said. “Or are we supposed to say nothing?” Her eyelid was fluttering so fiercely she had to press her palm flat against her eye in an effort to still it. “If you mean Oisín’s father,” she said, “don’t mention him, unless Emer mentions him first.” She took her hand away from her face and saw her grandson standing in the doorway. “Oisín!” she said, and she went over, laid a hand on his soft, fine hair. “Come and have a biscuit.” She offered the plate and watched him survey the contents, his fingers hovering above the biscuits but not quite touching. He finally selected a chocolate one shaped like a star. He took a small, careful bite and chewed slowly, eying her the way he had eyed the biscuits, making an assessment. She smiled. “Why don’t you sit here and tell us all about the airplane.” She pulled out two chairs, one for the child, one for herself, but the boy went around to the other side of the table and sat next to Colman. He had finished the biscuit, and Colman pushed the plate closer to him. “Have another,” he said. The boy chose again, more quickly this time. “Tell me,” Colman said, “where’s Pavel from?” “Chelsea.” “What does he do?” The boy shrugged, took another bite of biscuit. “Colman,” Kate said sharply, “would you see if there’s some lemonade in the fridge?” He looked at her, a look both guilty and defiant, but got up without saying anything and fetched the lemonade. They heard footsteps on the stairs, and laughter, and Emer came into the kitchen with Pavel in tow. Opening the fridge, she took out a litre of milk and drank straight from the carton. She wiped her mouth with her hand and put the milk back. Pavel nodded to Kate and Colman—an easy, relaxed nod—but didn’t join them at the table. Instead, he went over to a window. “They’re like gods, aren’t they?” he said, pointing to the three wind turbines rotating slowly on the mountain. “I feel I should take them a few dead chickens, kill a goat or something.” “Those things have caused no end of trouble,” Kate said. “Our neighbors say they can’t sleep at night with the noise of the blades.” “Perhaps not enough goats?” he said. She smiled and was about to offer him tea, but Emer linked his arm. “We’re going to the pub,” she said. “Just for the one. We won’t be long.” She blew Oisín a kiss. “Be good for your granny and grandad.” The boy sat quietly at the table, working his way through the biscuits. “We could see if there are cartoons on television,” Kate said. “Would you like that?” Colman glared at her as if she had suggested sending the child down a mine. “Television will rot his brain,” he said. He leaned in to the boy. “Tell you what,” he said. “Why don’t you and I go hunt those foxes?” The boy was already climbing down off his chair, the biscuits and lemonade forgotten. “What will we do with the foxes when we catch them?” he asked. “We’ll worry about that when it happens,” Colman said. He turned to Kate. “You didn’t want to come, did you?” “No,” she said, “it’s O.K. I’d better make a start on dinner.” She walked with them to the back porch, watched them go down the garden and scale the ditch at the end. The boy’s hair snagged as he squeezed beneath the barbed wire, and she knew that if she went to the ditch now she would find silky white strands left behind, like the locks of wool left by lambs. Dropping into the field on the other side, they made their way across the scrub, through grass and briars and wild saplings, Colman in front, the boy behind, almost running to keep up. The grass was in the first rush of spring growth. Come summer, it would be higher, higher than the boy’s head and blonder, as it turned, unharvested, to hay. They reached the pile of timber that used to be the hut, and Colman stopped, bent to take something from the ground. He held it in the air with one hand, gesticulating with the other, then gave it to the boy. Goodness knows what he was showing the child, she thought, what rubbish they were picking up. Whatever the thing was, she saw the boy discard it in the grass, and then they went onward, getting smaller and smaller, until they disappeared into the forest. An hour later, her husband and grandson returned, clattering into the kitchen. Oisín’s shoes and the hems of his trousers were covered in mud. He was carrying something, cradling it to his chest, and when she went to help him off with his shoes she saw that it was an animal skull. Colman went out to the utility room and rummaged around in the cupboards, knocking over pans and brushes, banging doors. “What are you looking for?” she said. The boy remained in the kitchen, stroking the skull as if it were a kitten. It was yellowy-white and long-nosed, with a broad forehead. Colman returned with a plastic bucket and a five-gallon drum of bleach. He took the skull from the boy and placed it in the bucket, poured the bleach on top until it reached the rim. “Now,” he said, “that’ll clean up nicely. Leave it a couple of days and you’ll see how white it is.” “Look,” Oisín said, grabbing Kate’s hand and dragging her over. “We found a dinosaur skull.” “A sheep, more likely,” his grandfather said. “A sheep that got caught in wire. The dinosaurs were killed by a meteorite millions of years ago.” Kate peered into the bucket. Little black things, flies or maggots, had already detached themselves from the skull and were floating loose. There was green around the eye sockets, and veins of mud grained deep in the bone. “What’s a meteorite?” the boy asked. The front door opened, and they heard Emer and Pavel coming down the hall. “The child doesn’t know what a meteorite is,” Colman said when they entered the kitchen. Emer rolled her eyes at her mother. She sniffed and wrinkled her nose. “It smells like a hospital in here,” she said. Pavel dropped to his haunches beside the bucket. “What’s this?” he said. “It’s a dinosaur skull,” Oisín said. “So it is,” Pavel said. Kate waited for her husband to contradict him, but Colman had settled into an armchair in the corner, holding a newspaper, chest height, in front of him. She looked down at the top of Pavel’s head, noticed how his hair had the faintest suggestion of a curl, how a tuft went its own way at the back. The scent of his shampoo was sharp and sweet and spiced, like an orange pomander. She looked away, out to the garden, and saw that the afternoon was fading. “I’m going to get some herbs,” she said, “before it’s too dark,” and, taking scissors and a basket, she went outside. She cut parsley first, then thyme. Inside the house, someone switched on the lights. She watched figures move about the kitchen, a series of family tableaux framed by the floral-curtained windows: now Colman and Oisín, now Oisín and Emer, sometimes Emer and Pavel. Every so often, she heard a burst of laughter. Back inside, she found Colman, Oisín, and Pavel gathered around a box on the table, an old cardboard Tayto box from beneath the stairs. Overhead, water rattled through the house’s antiquated pipes: the sound of Emer running a bath. From the box, Colman took some dusty school reports, a metal truck with its front wheels missing, a tin of toy soldiers. “Aha!” he said. “I knew we kept it.” He lifted out a long cylinder of paper and tapped it playfully against the top of Oisín’s head. “I’m going to show you what a meteorite looks like,” he said. Kate watched as Colman unfurled the paper and laid it flat on the table. It curled back into itself, and he reached for a couple of books from a nearby shelf, positioning them at top and bottom to hold it in place. It was a poster, four feet long and two feet wide. “This here,” Colman said, “is the asteroid belt.” He traced a circular pattern in the middle of the poster, and when he took away his hand his fingertips were gray with dust. Pavel moved aside to allow Kate a better view. She peered over her husband’s shoulder into a dazzling galaxy of stars and moons and dust. It was dizzying: the unimaginable expanses of space and time, the vast, spinning universe. We are there, she thought, if only we could see ourselves. We are there, and so is John in Japan. The poster was wrinkled and torn at the edges but otherwise intact. She looked at the planets, pictured them spinning and turning for all those years beneath the stairs, their moons in quiet orbit. “This is our man,” Colman said, pointing to the top left-hand corner. “This is the fellow that did for the dinosaurs.” The boy, on tiptoe, touched a finger to the thing Colman had indicated, a flaming ball of rock trailing dust and comets. “Did it only hit planet Earth?” “Yes,” his grandfather said. “Wasn’t that enough?” “So there could still be dinosaurs on other planets?” “No,” Colman said, at exactly the same time that Pavel said, “Very likely.” The boy turned to Pavel. “Really?” “I don’t see why not,” Pavel said. “There are millions of other galaxies and billions of other planets. I bet there’s lots of other dinosaurs. Maybe lots of other people, too.” “Like aliens?” the boy said. “Yes, aliens, if you want to call them that,” Pavel said, “although they might be very like us.” “I’ll agree to a pre-nup if you’ll agree to a non-compete clause.”Buy the print » Colman lifted the books from the edges of the poster, and it rolled back into itself with a slap of dust. He handed it to Oisín, then returned the rest of the things to the box, closed the cardboard flaps. “O.K., sonny,” he said, “let’s put this back under the stairs,” and the boy followed him out of the kitchen, the poster tucked under his arm like a musket. After dinner that evening, Kate refused all offers of help. She sent everyone to the sitting room to play cards while she took the dishes to the sink. Three red lights shone down from the wind turbines on the mountain, a warning to aircraft. She filled the sink with soapy water and watched the bubbles form psychedelic honeycombs, millions and millions of tiny domes glittering on the dirty plates. That night, their first sharing a bed in almost a year, Colman undressed in front of her as if she weren’t there. He matter-of-factly removed his shirt and trousers, folded them on a chair, and put on his pajamas. She found herself appraising his body as she might a stranger’s. Here, without the backdrop of forest and mountain, without the axe in his hand, she saw that he was old, saw the way the muscles of his legs had wasted and the gray of his chest hair. But she was not repulsed by any of these things; she simply noted them. She got her nightdress from under her pillow and began to unbutton her blouse. On the third button, she found that she could go no further and went out to the bathroom to undress there. Her figure had not entirely deserted her. Her breasts when she cupped them were shrunken, but she was slim, and her legs, which she’d always been proud of, were still shapely. Thus far, age had not delivered its estrangement of skin from bone: her thighs and stomach were firm, with none of the sagginess, the falling away, that sometimes happened. She had not suffered the collapse that befell other women, rendering them unrecognizable as the girls they had been in their youth, though perhaps that was yet to come, for she was only fifty-two. When she returned to the bedroom, Colman was in bed reading the newspaper. She peeled back the duvet on her side and got into bed. He glanced in her direction but continued to read. She read a few pages of a novel but couldn’t concentrate. “I thought I might take the boy fishing tomorrow,” he said. She put down her book. “I don’t know if that’s a good idea,” she said. “He’s had a busy day today. I was thinking of driving to town, taking him to the cinema.” “He can go to the cinema in London.” “We’ll see tomorrow,” she said, and took up her book again. Colman put away the newspaper and switched off the lamp on his side. He settled his head on the pillow but immediately sat up again, plumping the pillow, turning it over, until he had it to his liking. She switched off her lamp, lay there in the dark, careful where she placed her legs, her arms, readjusting to the space available to her. A door opened and closed, she heard footsteps on the landing, then another door, opening, closing. After a while she heard small, muffled noises, then a repetitive thudding, a headboard against a wall. The sound would be heard, too, in Emer’s old bedroom, where the boy was now alone. She thought of him waking in the night among those peculiar paintings, dozens of ravens with elongated necks, strange hybrid creatures, half bird, half human. She imagined specks of paint coming loose, falling on the boy in a black ash as he slept. Colman was curled away from her, facing the wall. She looked at him as the thudding grew louder. He was quiet, so quiet she could barely discern the sound of his breathing, and she knew that he was awake, for throughout their marriage he had always been a noisy sleeper. As soon as she reached the bottom of the stairs the next morning, she knew she was not the first up. It was as if someone had cut through the air before her, had broken the invisible membrane that formed during the night. From the utility room she heard the boy’s high, excited babble. He was in his pajamas, crouched beside the bucket of bleach, and beside him, in jeans and a shirt, his hair still wet from the shower, was Pavel. Oisín pointed at the bucket. In the pool of an eye socket something was floating, something small and white and chubby. Kate bent to take a look. Her arm brushed against Pavel’s shoulder, but he did not move away or shift position, and they remained like that, barely touching, staring into the bucket. A film of tiny insects and bits of vegetation lay upon the surface. The white thing was a maggot, its ridged belly bloated. Oisín looked from Pavel to Kate. “Can I have it for a pet?” he said. “No!” they said in unison, and Kate laughed. She felt her face redden, and she straightened up, took a step back from the bucket. Pavel stood up, too, ran a hand through his wet hair. The boy continued to watch the maggot, mesmerized. He was so close that his breath created ripples, his fringe flopping forward over his face and almost trailing in the bleach. “O.K.,” Kate said. “That’s enough,” and, taking him by the elbow, she lifted him gently to his feet. “Can I take the skull out?” he asked. Pavel shrugged and glanced at Kate. He seemed downcast this morning, she thought, quieter in himself. She looked at the skull and at the debris that had floated free of it, and something about it, the emptiness, the lifelessness, repulsed her, and suddenly she couldn’t bear the idea of the boy’s small hands touching it. “No,” she said, “it’s not ready yet. Maybe tomorrow.” Emer didn’t appear for breakfast, and when finally she arrived downstairs it was clear that there had been a row. She made a mug of coffee and, draping one of her father’s coats around her shoulders, went outside to drink it. She paced up and down past the kitchen window, her phone to her ear, talking loudly. When she came back in, she called from the hall, “Get your coat, Oisín. We’re going in the car.” Oisín and Pavel were at the table, playing with the contents of the Tayto box. The two-wheeled truck and the soldiers had been commandeered for a war effort. “I thought Oisín was staying with us,” Kate said. Emer shook her head. “Nope,” she said. “He’s coming with me.” “I’ll drive you,” Pavel said quietly, getting up from the table. “No, thank you, I can manage.” “You’re not used to that car,” he said. “I don’t have to meet your friends. I can drop you off, collect you later.” “I’d rather walk,” Emer said. Colman was in his armchair. He had a screwdriver and was taking apart a broken toaster, setting the pieces out on the floor. “Listen to her,” he said, to no one in particular. “The great walker.” He put down the screwdriver, sighed, and stood up. “We’ll go in my car,” he said. He nodded to Oisín—“Come on, sonny” —and without saying more he left the kitchen. The boy abandoned his game and trotted down the hall after his grandfather. Already he had adopted Colman’s walk, a comically exaggerated stride, his hands stuck deep in his pockets. Emer gave her mother a perfunctory kiss and followed them. After they left, Pavel excused himself, saying he had work to do. “I’m afraid I’m poor company,” he said. He went upstairs, and Kate busied herself with everyday jobs, though she didn’t vacuum, in case it might disturb him. She wondered what he did for a living and imagined him first as an architect, then as an engineer of some sort. She put on her gardening gloves and took the waste outside for composting. The garden was a mess. Winter had left behind broken branches, pinecones, and other storm wreckage: the forest’s creeping advance. She remembered how years ago a man had come selling aerial photographs door to door. He had shown her a photo of their house and, next to it, the forest. She had been astonished to see that, from the air, the forest was a perfect rectangle, all sharp angles and clean lines. Raising the lid of the compost bin, she tipped in the waste. There used to be a bench on the patch of concrete where the bin now stood. In the early years, when the children were at school and Colman at work, she’d often been seized by a need to leave the house and would put on a coat and sit in the garden, reading, as the wind deposited pine needles and bits of twig in her lap. The Dennehys, she knew, had thought her behavior odd, and Mrs. Dennehy, meaning well, had once mentioned the matter to Colman. Noon passed, and the day edged into early afternoon. She listened for the sound of Pavel moving about the room overhead, but everything was quiet. Eventually, she went upstairs to see if he would like some lunch. She knocked and heard the creak of bed springs, then footsteps crossing the floor. When he opened the door, she saw papers spread across the bed, black-and-white street-scapes with sections hatched in blue ink, and thought, Yes, an architect after all. “You could have used the dining-room table,” she said. “I didn’t think.” “It’s fine,” he said. “I can work anywhere. I’m finished now anyway.” She had intended to ask if she could bring him up a sandwich, but instead heard herself say, “I’m going for a walk, if you’d like to join me.” “I’d love to,” he said. She put on her boots and found a pair for him in the shed. They didn’t climb the ditch but went through the gate and took an old forestry path that skirted the scrub. Passing the pyre of timber that was once the hut, he said, “I saw your husband chopping firewood this morning. He’s remarkably fit for a man of his age.” “Yes,” she said, “he was always strong.” “You must have been very young when you married.” “I was twenty-three,” she said. “Hardly a child bride, but young by today’s reckoning, I suppose.” They arrived at an opening into the forest. A sign forbidding guns and fires was nailed to a tree, half the letters missing. He hesitated, and she walked on ahead, down a grassy path littered with pine needles. She slowed to allow him to catch up, and they walked side by side, their boots sinking into the ground, soft from recent rain. They stopped at a sack of household waste—nappies, eggshells, foil cartons spilling over the forest floor. “Who would do such a thing?” Pavel said. Buy the print » “A local, most likely,” she said. “They come here at night, when they know they won’t be seen.” Pavel tried to gather the rubbish back into the bag, a hopelessly ineffective gesture, like a surgeon attempting to heap intestines back into a ruptured abdomen. When he stood up, his hands were covered in dirt and pine needles. She took a handkerchief from her coat pocket and handed it to him. “Does it happen a lot?” he asked. “Only close to the entrance,” she said. “People are lazy.” He had finished with the handkerchief and seemed unsure what to do with it. “I don’t want it back,” she said, and, grinning, he put it in his own pocket. It was quieter the farther in they went, fewer birds, the occasional rustle of an unseen animal in the undergrowth. He talked about London and about his work. She talked about how they’d moved from the city when Colman got the job at the Co-op, the years when the children were young, John in Japan. She noticed his limp becoming more pronounced and slowed her pace. “Thanks for going to such trouble with the room,” he said. “It was no trouble.” “I was touched by it,” he said, “especially the bear duvet and the rabbit.” She glanced at him and saw that he was teasing. She laughed. “She didn’t tell you I was coming, did she?” he said. “No, but it doesn’t matter.” “I’m sorry it caused awkwardness,” he said. “I know your husband is annoyed.” “He’s annoyed with Emer,” she said, “not with you. Anyway, it doesn’t matter.” They had arrived at a fallen tree, and, sensing that he was tiring, she sat on the trunk, and he sat beside her. “How long have you known Emer?” she said. “Not very long.” She tilted her head back and looked up. Here there was no sky, but there was light, and as it travelled down through the trees it seemed to absorb hues of yellow and green. A colony of toadstools, brown puffballs, sprouted from the grass by her feet. Pavel nudged them with his boot. They released a cloud of pungent spores, and, fascinated, he bent and prodded them with his finger until they released more. He got out his phone and took a photograph. “I’ve seen Oisín three times in the last four years,” she said. “Emer will take him back to London tomorrow, and I can’t bear it.” He put the phone away and, reaching out, took her hand. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t understand why Emer would live anywhere else when she could live here. But then I guess I don’t understand Emer.” “I’m a stranger to him,” she said. “I’m his grandmother and I’m a stranger. He’ll grow up not knowing who I am.” “He already knows who you are. He’ll remember.” “He’ll remember that bloody skull in the bucket,” she said bitterly. Very softly, he began to stroke her palm with his thumb. His touch was gentle but inquiring, as if there were something about her that might reveal itself through the skin. She pulled her hand away and got up. Standing with her back to him, she pointed to a dark corridor of trees that ran perpendicular to the main path. “That’s a shortcut,” she said. “It leads down to the road.” This route was less used, tangled and overgrown, obstructed here and there by trees that leaned in a slant across the path, not quite fallen, resting against other trees. Ferns grew tall and curling, and the moss was inches thick on the tree trunks. In the quiet, she imagined she could hear the spines of leaves snapping as her boots pressed them into the mud. The path brought them to an exit by the main road, and they walked back to the house in silence, arriving just as Colman’s car pulled into the driveway. They were all back: Colman, Emer, Oisín. Emer’s mood had changed. Now she was full of the frenetic energy that often seized her. She opened the drawers of the cabinet in the sitting room and spread the contents all over the carpet, searching for a catalogue from an old college exhibition. Oisín had a new toy truck that his grandfather had bought him. It was almost identical to the truck from beneath the stairs, except that this one had all its wheels. He sat on the kitchen floor and drove it back and forth over the tiles, making revving noises. Colman was subdued. He made a pot of tea, not his usual kind but the lemon-and-ginger that Kate liked, and they sat together at the table. “How did you get on with Captain Kirk?” he said. “Fine,” she said. Emer came in from the sitting room, having found what she was looking for. She poured tea from the pot and stood gazing out the window as she drank it. Pavel was at the end of the garden, taking photographs of the wind turbines. “Know what they remind me of?” Emer said. “Those bumblebees John used to catch in jars. He’d put one end of a stick through their bellies and the other end in the ground, and we’d watch their wings going like crazy.” “Emer!” Kate said. “They were always dead when he did that.” Emer turned from the window, gave a sharp little laugh. “I forgot,” she said. “St. John, the Chosen One.” She emptied what was left of her tea down the sink. “Trust me,” she said. “The bees were alive. Or at least they were when he started.” Oisín got up from the floor and went over to his mother, the new truck in his hand. “If I don’t take my laser gun, can I take this instead?” he said. “Yes, yes,” Emer said. “Now go see if you can find my lighter in the sitting room, will you?” She made shooing gestures with her hand. The child stopped where he was, considering the truck. “Or maybe I’ll take the gun and I won’t take my Lego,” he said. “They probably have loads of Lego in Australia.” “Australia?” Kate said. She looked across the table at Colman, but he was staring into his cup, swirling dregs of tea around the bottom. Emer sighed. “Sorry, Mam,” she said. “I was going to tell you. It’s not for ages anyway, not until summer.” In bed that night she began to cry. Colman switched on a lamp and rolled onto his side to face her. “You know what that girl’s like,” he said. “She’s never lasted at anything yet. Australia will be no different.” “But how do you know?” she said, when she could manage to get the words out. “Maybe they’ll stay there forever.” She buried her face in his shoulder. The smell of him, the feel of him, the way her body slotted around his, was as she remembered. She climbed onto him so that they lay length to length, and, opening the buttons of his pajamas, she rested her head on the wiry hair of his chest. He patted her back awkwardly through her nightdress as she continued to cry. She kissed him, on his mouth, on his neck, and, undoing the remainder of the buttons, she stroked his stomach. He didn’t respond, but neither did he object, and she slid her hand lower, under the waistband of his pajama bottoms. He stopped patting her back. Taking her gently by the wrist, he removed her hand and placed it by her side. Then he eased himself out from under her and turned away toward the wall. Her nightdress had slid up around her belly, and she tugged it down over her knees. She edged back across the mattress and lay very still, staring at the ceiling. The house was quiet, with none of the sounds of the previous night. She could hear Colman fumbling at his pajamas, and when she glanced sideways she saw that he was doing up his buttons. He switched off the lamp, and after a while she heard snoring. She knew that she should try to sleep, too, but couldn’t. Tomorrow, they would return to London: Oisín, Emer, and Pavel. Come summer, her daughter and grandson would leave for Australia. Pavel, she assumed, would not. She thought of Oisín sleeping, and pictured him waking early the next morning, sneaking down to the bucket at first light to get the skull. Swinging her legs over the side of the bed, she went downstairs in her bare feet. A lamp on the telephone table, one of Colman’s wooden lamps with a red shade, threw a rose-colored light over the hall. The door of the sitting room was partly open, and she thought she heard something stirring. She went to the door and, in the light filtering in from the hall, saw a shape on the sofa. It was Pavel, banished she presumed by Emer, with a rug over him and using one of the cushions as a pillow. He sat up and reached for his glasses on the coffee table. He appeared confused, as if he’d just woken, but she noticed how his expression changed when he realized it was her. “Kate,” he said, and she was conscious, even in the semi-darkness, of his eyes moving over the thin cotton of her nightdress. He had stripped to his underclothes, and she saw that his body, like her own, was no longer in its prime but was strong yet, young enough still. She remained in the doorway. He said nothing more, and she understood that he was waiting, allowing her to decide. After a moment, she turned and walked down the hall to the kitchen. In the utility room, she put on a pair of rubber gloves and, dipping her hand into the bucket, lifted out the skull. It dripped bleach onto the floor, and she got a towel and dried it off, wiping the rims of the eye sockets, the crevices of the jaws. She sat it on top of the washing machine and looked at it, and it returned her gaze with empty, cavernous eyes. Not bothering with a coat, she slipped her feet into Colman’s Wellingtons and carried the bucket of bleach outside. It was cold, hinting at late frost, and she shivered in her nightdress. In the field behind the house, the pile of newly chopped wood appeared almost white in the moonlight, and moonlight glinted on the galvanized roof of the Dennehys’ shed and silvered the tops of the trees in the forest. There were stars, millions of them, the familiar constellations she had known since childhood. She tipped the bucket over, spilling the bleach onto the ground. For a second it lay upon the surface, then it gradually seeped away until only a flotsam of dead insects speckled the stones.

Looking in the hotel mirror, David Jenkins adjusted the Stetson he disliked and pulled on a windbreaker with a cattle-vaccine logo. He worked for a syndicate of cattle geneticists in Oklahoma, though he’d never met his employers—he had earned his credentials through an online agricultural portal, much the way that people became ministers. He was still in his twenties, a very bright young man, but astonishingly uneducated in every other way. He had spent the night in Jordan at the Garfield Hotel, which was an ideal location for meeting his ranch clients in the area. He had woken early enough to be the first customer at the café. On the front step, an old dog slept with a cancelled first-class stamp stuck to its butt. By the time David had ordered breakfast, older ranchers occupied several of the tables, waving to him familiarly. Then a man from Utah, whom he’d met at the hotel, appeared in the doorway and stopped, looking around the room. The man, who’d told David that he’d come to Jordan to watch the comets, was small and intense, middle-aged, wearing pants with an elastic waistband and flashy sneakers. Several of the ranchers were staring at him. David had asked the hotel desk clerk, an elderly man, about the comets. The clerk said, “I don’t know what he’s talking about and I’ve lived here all my life. He doesn’t even have a car.” David studied the menu to keep from being noticed, but it was too late. The man was at his table, laughing, his eyes shrinking to points and his gums showing. “Stop worrying! I’ll get my own table,” he said, drumming his fingers on the back of David’s chair. David felt that in some odd way he was being assessed. The door to the café, which had annoying bells on a string, kept clattering open and shut to admit a broad sample of the community. David enjoyed all the comradely greetings and gentle needling from the ranchers, and felt himself to be connected to the scene, if lightly. Only the fellow from Utah, sitting alone, seemed entirely apart. The cook pushed dish after dish across her tall counter while the waitress sped to keep up. She had a lot to do, but it lent her a star quality among the diners, who teased her with mock personal questions or air-pinched as her bottom went past. David made notes about this and that on a pad he took from his shirt pocket, until the waitress, a yellow pencil stuck in her chignon, arrived with his bacon and eggs. He turned a welcoming smile to her, hoping that when he looked back the man would be gone, but he was still at his table, giving David an odd military salute and then holding his nose. David didn’t understand these gestures and was disquieted by the implication that he knew the man. He ate quickly, then went to the counter to pay. The waitress came out of the kitchen, wiping her hands on a dishcloth, looked the cash register up and down, and said, “Everything O.K., Dave?” “Yes, very good, thanks.” “Put it away in an awful hurry. Out to Larsen’s?” “No, I was there yesterday. Bred heifers. They held everything back.” “They’re big on next year. I wonder if it’ll do them any good.” “They’re still here, ain’t they? I’m headed for Jorgensen’s. Big day.” Two of the ranchers had finished eating and, Stetsons on the back of their heads, chairs tilted, they picked their teeth with the corners of their menus. As David put his wallet in his pocket and headed for the door, he realized he was being followed. He didn’t turn until he was halfway across the parking lot. When he did, the gun was in his stomach and his new friend was smiling at him. “Name’s Ray. Where’s your outfit?” Ray had a long, narrow face and tightly marcelled dirty-blond hair that fell low on his forehead. “Are you robbing me?” “I need a ride.” Ray got in the front seat of David’s car, tucked the gun in his pants, and pulled his shirt over the top of it, a blue terry-cloth shirt with a large breast pocket that contained a pocket liner and a number of ballpoint pens. The flap of the pocket liner said “Powell Savings, Modesto, CA.” “Nice car. What’re all the files in back for?” “Breeding records—cattle-breeding records.” “Mind?” He picked up David’s cell phone and, without waiting for an answer, tapped in a number. In a moment, his voice changed to an intimate murmur. “I’m there, or almost there—” Covering the mouthpiece, he pointed to the intersection. “Take that one right there.” David turned east. “I got it wrote down someplace, East 200, North 13, but give it to me again, my angel. Or I can call you as we get closer. O.K., a friend’s giving me a lift.” He covered the mouthpiece. “Your name?” “David.” “David from?” “Reed Point.” “Yeah, great guy I knew back in Reed Place.” “Reed Point.” “I mean, Reed Point. Left the Beamer for an oil change, and Dave said he was headed this way. Wouldn’t even let me split the gas. So, O.K., just leaving Jordan. How much longer, Morsel? Two hours! Are you fucking kidding? O.K., O.K., two hours. I’m just anxious to see you, baby, not being short with you at all.” Lifting his eyes to the empty miles of sagebrush, Ray snapped the cell phone shut and said, sighing, “Two fucking hours.” If it weren’t for the gun in his pants, he could have been any other aging lovebird. He turned the radio on briefly. “Swap Shop” was on the air: “Broken refrigerator suitable for a smoker.” Babies bawling in the background. He turned it off. David was trying to guess who Ray might really be—that is, if he was a fugitive from the law, someone he could bring to justice, in exchange for fame or some kind of reward, something good for business. He had tried everything he could to enhance his cattle-insemination business, even refrigerator magnets with his face on them that said “Don’t go bust shipping dries.” He asked, “Ray, do you feel like telling me what this is all about?” “Sure, Dave. It’s all about you doing as you’re told.” “I see. And I’m taking you somewhere, am I?” “Uh-huh, and staying as needed. Jesus Christ, if this isn’t the ugliest country I ever seen.” “How did you pick me?” “I picked your car. You were a throw-in. I hadn’t took you along you’d’ve reported your car stolen. This way you still got it. It’s a win-win. The lucky thing for you is you’re my partner now. And you wanna pick up the tempo here? You’re driving like my grandma.” “This isn’t a great road. Deer jump out on it all the time. My cousin had one come through the windshield on him.” “Fuckin’ pin it or I’ll drive it like I did steal it.” David sped up slightly. This seemed to placate Ray and he slumped by the window and stared at the landscape going by. They passed an old pickup truck, travelling in the opposite direction, a dead animal in the back with one upright leg trailing an American flag. After they’d driven for nearly two hours, mostly in silence, a light tail-dragger aircraft with red-and-white-banded wings flew just overhead and landed on the road in front of them. The pilot climbed out and shuffled toward the car. David rolled down his window, and a lean, weathered face under a sweat-stained cowboy hat looked in. “You missed your turn,” the man said. “Mile back, turn north on the two-track.” Ray seemed to be trying to send a greeting that showed all his teeth but he was ignored by the pilot. “Nice little Piper J-3 Cub,” Ray said. The pilot strode back to the plane, taxied down the road, got airborne, and banked sharply over a five-strand barbed wire, startling seven cows and their calves, which ran off into the sage, scattering meadowlarks and clouds of pollen. David turned the car around. Ray said, “Old fellow back at the hotel said there’s supposed to be dinosaurs around here.” He gazed at the pale light of a gas well on a far ridge. “That’s what they say.” “What d’you suppose one of them is worth? Like a whole Tyrannosaurus rex?” David just looked at Ray. Here was the turn, a two-track that was barely manageable in an ordinary sedan and David couldn’t imagine how it was negotiated in winter or spring, when the notorious local gumbo turned to mud. He’d delivered a Charolais bull near here one fall, and it was bad enough then. Plus, the bull had torn up his trailer and he’d lost money on the deal. “So, Dave, we’re about to arrive and I should tell you what the gun is for. I’m here to meet a girl, but I don’t know how it’s gonna turn out. I may need to bail and you’re my lift. The story is, my car is in for repair. You stay until we see how this goes and carry me out of here, if necessary. My friend here says you’re onboard.” “I guess I understand, but what does this all depend on?” “It depends on whether I like the girl or not, whether we’re compatible and want to start a family business. I have a lot I’d like to pass on to the next generation.” The next bend revealed the house, a two-story ranch building with little of its paint left. Ray gazed at the Piper Cub, which was now parked in a field by the house, and at the Montana state flag popping on the iron flagpole. “Oro y plata,” he said, chuckling. “Perfect. Now, Davey, I need you to bone up on the situation here. This is the Weldon Case cattle ranch, and it runs from here right up to the Bakken oil field, forty miles away, which is where all the oro y plata is at the moment. I’m guessing that was Weldon in the airplane. I met Weldon’s daughter, Morsel, through a dating service. Well, we haven’t actually met in real time, but we’re about to. Morsel thinks she loves me, and we’re just gonna have to see about that. All you have to know is that Morsel thinks I’m an Audi dealer from Simi Valley, California. She’s going on one photograph of me standing in front of an Audi flagship that did not belong to me. You decide you want to help, and you may see more walkin’-around money than you’re used to. If you don’t, well, you’ve seen how I put my wishes into effect.” He patted the bulge under his shirt. “I just whistle a happy tune and start shooting.” Buy the print » David pulled up under the gaze of Weldon Case, who had emerged from the plane. When he rolled down the window to greet the old man again, Case just stared, then turned to call out to the house. “It’s the cowboy way,” Ray muttered through an insincere smile. “Or else he’s retarded. Dave, ask him if he remembers falling out of his high chair.” As they got out of the car, Morsel appeared on the front step and inquired, in a penetrating contralto, “Which one is it?” Ray raised his hands and tilted his head to one side, as though modestly questioning himself. David noted that the gun was inadequately concealed and turned quickly to shake Weldon Case’s hand. It was like seizing a plank. “You’re looking at him,” Ray called out to Morsel. “Oh, Christ,” she yelled. “Is this what I get?” It was hard to say whether this was a positive response or not. Morsel was a scale model of her father, wind-weathered and, if anything, less feminine. Her view of the situation was quickly clarified as she raced forward to embrace Ray, whose look of suave detachment was briefly interrupted by fear. A tooth was missing, as well as a small piece of her ear. “Oh, Ray!” Weldon looked at David with a sour expression, then spoke, in a lustreless tone: “Morsel has made some peach cobbler. It was her ma’s recipe. Her ma is dead.” Ray put on a ghastly look of sympathy, which seemed to fool Morsel, who squeezed his arm and said, “Started in her liver and just took off.” A small trash pile next to the porch featured a couple of played-out Odor-Eaters. David wondered where the walkin’-around money Ray had alluded to was supposed to come from. “Place is kind of a mess,” Morsel warned. “We don’t collect but we never get rid of.” As they went into the house, Weldon asked David if he enjoyed shooting coyotes. He replied, “I just drive Ray around”—Ray turned to listen—“and whatever Ray wants I guess is what we do . . . whatever he’s into.” David kept to himself that he enjoyed popping coyotes out his car window with the .25-06 with a Redfield range-finder scope and a tripod that he’d got from Hill Country Customs. David lived with his mother and had a habit of telling her about the great shots he’d made—like the five-hundred-yarder on Tin Can Hill with only the hood for a rest, no sandbags, no tripod. David’s Uncle Maury had told him a long time ago, “It don’t shoot flat, throw the fuckin’ thing away.” David, who enjoyed brutally fattening food, thought Morsel was a good cook, but Ray ate only the salad, discreetly lifting each leaf until the dressing ran off. Weldon watched Ray and hardly said a word, as Morsel grew more manic, jiggling with laughter and enthusiasm at each lighthearted remark. In fact, it was necessary to lower the temperature of the subjects—to heart attacks, highway wrecks, cancer—in order to get her to stop guffawing. Weldon planted his hands flat on the table, rose partway, and announced that he’d use the tractor to pull the plane around back. David was preoccupied with the mountain of tuna casserole between him and the peach cobbler and hardly heard him. Ray, small and disoriented next to Morsel, shot his eyes around the table, looking for something he could eat. “Daddy don’t say much,” Morsel said. “I can’t say much,” Ray said, “with him here. Dave, could you cut us a little slack?” “Sure, Ray, of course.” David got up, still chewing. “See you in the room,” Ray said sharply, twisting his chin toward the door. Weldon had shown them their room by walking past it and flicking the door open without a word. It contained two iron bedsteads and a dresser, atop which were David’s and Ray’s belongings, the latter’s consisting of a JanSport backpack with the straps cut off. David was better organized, with an actual overnight bag and a Dopp kit. He had left the cattle receipts and breeding documents in the car. He flopped on the bed, hands behind his head, then got up abruptly and went to the door. He looked out and listened for a long moment, eased it closed, and shot to the dresser, where he began rooting through Ray’s belongings: rolls of money in rubber bands, generic Viagra from India, California lottery tickets, a passport identifying Raymond Coelho, a woman’s aqua-colored wallet, with a debit card in the name of Eleanor Coelho from Food Processors Credit Union of Modesto, Turlock grocery receipts, a bag of trail mix, and the gun. David lifted the gun carefully with the tips of his fingers. He was startled by its lightness. Turning it over in his hand, he was compelled to acknowledge that there was no hole in the barrel. It was a toy. He returned it to the pack, fluffed the sides, and sped to his bed to begin feigning sleep. It wasn’t long before Ray came in, singing “Now Is the Hour” in a flat and aggressive tone that hardly suited the lyrics: “Sunset glow fades in the west, night o’er the valley is creeping! Birds cuddle down in their nest, soon all the world will be sleeping. But not you, Dave. You’re awake, I can tell. I hope you enjoyed the song. It’s Hugo Winterhalter. Morsel sang it to me. She’s very nice, and she needs a man.” “Looks like you got the job.” “Do what? Hey, here’s what’s going on with me: I’m starving.” “I’m sure you are, Ray. You ate like a bird.” “I had no choice. That kind of food gathers around the chambers of the heart like an octopus. But right behind the house they got a vegetable garden, and my plan for you is to slip out and bring me some vegetables. I’ve been told to stay out of the garden. Don’t touch the tomatoes—they’re not ripe.” “What else is there?” “Greens and root vegetables.” “I’m not going out there.” “Oh, yes, you are.” “What makes you think so?” Ray went to his pack and got out the gun. “This makes me think so. This will really stick to your ribs, get it?” “I’m not picking vegetables for you, or, technically speaking, stealing them for you. Forget it.” “Wow. Is this a mood swing?” “Call it what you want. Otherwise, it’s shoot or shut up.” “O.K., but not for the reason you think. I prefer not to wake up the whole house.” “And the body’d be a problem for you, as a house guest and new fiancé.” “Very well, very well. This time.” Ray put the gun back in his pack. “You don’t know how close you came.” “Whatever.” David rolled over to sleep, but he couldn’t stop his thoughts. He should have spent the day at Jorgensen’s with his arm up a cow’s ass. He had a living to make and, if it hadn’t been for his inappropriate curiosity about Ray and Morsel, he’d already be back in Jordan, looking to grab a room for the night. But the roll of money in Ray’s pack and the hints of more to come had made him wonder how anxious he was to get back to work. There was opportunity in the air and he wanted to see how it would all play out. “Ray, you awake?” “I can be. What d’you want, asshole?” “I just have something I want to get off my chest.” “Make it quick. I need my Zs.” “Sure, Ray, try this one on for size: the gun’s a toy.” “The gun’s a what?” “A toy.” “You think a gun’s a toy?” “No, Ray, I think your gun’s a toy. It’s a fake. And looks like you are, too.” “Where’s the fuckin’ light switch? I’m not taking this shit.” “Stub your toe jumping off the bed like that.” “Might be time to clip your wings, sonny.” “Ray, I’m here for you. Just take a moment to look at the barrel of your so-called gun, and then let’s talk.” Ray found the lamp and paced the squeaking floorboards. “Taking a leak off the porch. Be right back,” he said. Through the open bedroom door, David could see him silhouetted in the moonlight, a silver arc splashing onto the dirt, his head thrown back in what David took to be a plausible posture of despair. By the time Ray walked back in he was already talking: “ . . . an appraiser in Modesto, California, where I grew up. I did some community theatre there, played Prince Oh So True in a children’s production and thought I was going places, then ‘Twelve Angry Men’—I was one of them, which is where the pistol came from. I was the hangman in ‘Motherlode.’ Got married, had a baby girl, lost my job, got another one, went to Hawaii as a steward on a yacht belonging to a movie star, who was working at a snow-cone stand a year before the yacht, the coke, the babes, and the wine. I had to sign a nondisclosure agreement, but then I got into a fight with the movie star and got kicked off the boat at Diamond Head. They just rowed me to shore in a dinghy and dumped me off. I hiked all the way to the crater and used the rest room to clean up, then took the tour bus into Honolulu. I tried to sell the celebrity drug-use story to a local paper, but it went nowhere because of the confidentiality agreement. Everything I sign costs me money. About this time, my wife’s uncle’s walnut farm was failing. He took a loan out on the real estate, and I sold my car, which was a mint, rust-free ’78 Trans Am, handling package, W-72 performance motor, Solar Gold with a Martinique Blue interior. We bought a bunch of FEMA trailers from the Katrina deal and hauled them to California. We lost our asses. The uncle gasses himself in his garage, and my wife throws me out. I moved into a hotel for migrant workers, and started using the computers at the Stanislaus County Library and sleeping at the McHenry Mansion. One of the tour guides was someone I used to fuck in high school and she slipped me into one of the rooms for naps. I met Morsel online. I told her I was on hard times. She told me she was coining it, selling bootleg Oxycontin in the Bakken oil field, but she was lonely. It was a long shot. Montana. Fresh start. New me. Bus to Billings and hit the road. I made it to Jordan, and I had nothing left. The clerk at that fleabag barely let me have a room. I told him I was there for the comets. I don’t know where I come up with that. Breakfast at the café was my last dime and no tip. I had to make a move. So what happens now? You bust me with Morsel? You turn me in? Or you join us?” “You pretty sure on the business end of this thing?” David asked, with a coldness that surprised him. “It’s O.K. for now, but ultimately I’d like to work somewhere other than a post-apocalyptic world.”Buy the print » “A hundred per cent, but Morsel’s got issues with other folks already in it. There’s some risk, but when isn’t there, with stakes like this? Think about it, Dave. If you’re at all interested in getting rich, you tell me.” Ray was soon snoring. David was intrigued that all these revelations failed to disturb his sleep. He himself was wide awake, brooding over how colorless his own life was in comparison with Ray’s. Ray was a con man and a failure, but what had he ever done? Finish high school? High school had been anguish, persecution, and suffering, but even in that he was unexceptional. He’d never had sex with a mansion tour guide. He’d had sex with a fat girl he disliked. Then the National Guard. Fort Harrison in the winter. Cleaning billets. Inventorying ammunition. Unskilled maintenance on UH-60 Blackhawks. Praying for deployment against worldwide towel heads. A commanding officer who told the recruits that the President of the United States was “a pencil-wristed twat.” Girlfriend fatter every time he went home. He still lived with his mother. Was still buying his dope from the same guy at the body shop he’d got it from in the eighth grade. Perhaps it was surprising he’d come up with anything at all, but he had: Bovine Deluxe, L.L.C., a crash course in artificially inseminating cattle. David took to it like a duck to water: driving around the countryside detecting and synchronizing estrus, handling frozen semen, keeping breeding records—all easily learnable, but David brought art to it, and he had no idea where that art had come from. He was a genius preg-tester. Whether he was straight or stoned, his rate of accuracy, as proven in spring calves, was renowned. Actually, David preferred preg-testing stoned. Grass gave him a greater ability to visualize the progress of his arm up the cow’s rectum. His excitement began as soon as he donned his coveralls, pulled on his glove, lubed it with O.B. goo, and stepped up to the cow stuck in the chute. Holding the tail high overhead with his left hand, he got his right hand all the way in, against the cow’s attempt to expel it, shovelled out the manure to clear the way past the cervix, and finally, nearly up to his shoulder, grasped the uterus. David could nail a pregnancy at two months, when the calf was smaller than a mouse. He never missed, and no cow that should have been culled turned up without a calf in the spring. He could tell the rancher how far along the cow was by his informal gradations: mouse, rat, Chihuahua, cat, fat cat, raccoon, beagle. Go through the herd, or until his arm was exhausted. Throw the glove away, write up the invoice, strip the coveralls, look for food and a room. Perfect. Except for the dough. He’d once dreamed of owning jewels, especially rubies, and that dream was coming back. Maybe glue one on his forehead like a Hindu. It’d go over big on his ranch calls. Morsel made breakfast for her father, David, and Ray—eggs, biscuits, and gravy. David was thinking about Ray’s “last dime” back in Jordan versus the rolls of bills in his pack and watching Weldon watch Ray as breakfast was served. Morsel just leaned against the stove while the men ate. “Anyone want to go to Billings today to see the cage fights?” she asked. David looked up and smiled but no one answered her. Ray was probing around his food with his fork, pushing the gravy away from the biscuits, and Weldon was flinching. Weldon wore his black Stetson with the salt-encrusted sweat stain halfway up the crown. David thought it was downright unappetizing, not the sort of thing a customer for top-drawer bull semen would wear. At last Weldon spoke at top volume, as though calling out to his livestock. “What’d you say your name was?” “Ray.” “Well, Ray, why don’t you stick that fork all the way in and eat like a man?” “I’m doing my best, Mr. Case, but I will eat nothing with a central nervous system.” “Daddy, leave Ray alone. You’ll have time to get to know each other and find out what Ray enjoys eating.” When Morsel brought Ray some canned pineapple slices, he looked up at her with what David took to be genuine affection. She turned to David and said, “It’s all you can eat around here,” but the moment he stuck his fork back in his food she put a hand in his face and said, “That’s all you can eat!” and laughed. David noticed her cold blue eyes and thought he was beginning to understand her. To Weldon, she said, “Daddy, you feel like showing Ray ’n’ ’em the trick?” Weldon stopped his rhythmic lip pursing. “Oh, Morsel,” he said coyly. “C’mon, Daddy. Give you a dollar.” “O.K., Mor, put on the music,” he said with a sigh of good-humored defeat. Morsel went over to a low cupboard next to the pie safe and pulled out a small plastic record-player and a 45-r.p.m. record, which proved to be a scratchy version of “Cool Water,” by the Sons of the Pioneers. Weldon swayed to the mournful tune and then seemed to come to life as Morsel placed a peanut in front of him and the lyrics began: “Keep a-movin’, Dan, / Don’t you listen to him, Dan. / He’s a devil not a man.” Weldon took off his hat and set it upside down beside him, revealing the thinnest comb-over across a snow-white pate. Then he picked up the peanut and, with sinuous movements, balanced it on his nose. It remained there until near the end of the record—“Dan, can you see, / That big green tree, / Where the water’s runnin’ free”—when the peanut fell to the table and Weldon’s chin dropped to stare at it. When the record ended, he replaced his hat, stood without a word, and left the room. For a moment it was quiet, and then came the sound of Weldon’s plane cranking up. “Daddy’s pretty hard on himself when he don’t make it to the end of the record,” Morsel said glumly, as she cleared the dishes. Heading for the living room, she added, “Me and Ray thought you ought to see what dementia looks like. It don’t look good and it’s expensive.” David had taken care to copy out the information from Ray’s passport onto the back of a matchbook cover, which he tore off, rolled into a cylinder, and put inside a bottle of aspirin. And there it stayed until Ray and Morsel headed off to the cage fights. David used his cell phone and 411 Connect to call Ray’s home in Modesto and chat with his wife or, as she claimed to be, his widow. It took two calls, a couple of hours apart. The first try, he got her answering machine: “You know the drill: leave it at the beep.” On the second try, he got Ray’s wife. David identified himself as an account assistant with the Internal Revenue Service and Ray’s wife listened only briefly before stating in a firm, clear, and seemingly ungrieving voice that Ray was dead: “That’s what I told the last guy and that’s what I’m telling you.” She said that he had been embezzling from a credit union, left a suicide note, and disappeared. “I’m doing home health care. Whatever he stole he kept. Killing himself was the one good idea he come up with in the last thirty years. At least it’s kept the government from garnisheeing my wages, what little they are. I been through all this with the other guy that called, and we have to wait for his death to be confirmed before I get no benefits. If I know Ray, he’s on the bottom of the Tuolumne River, just to fuck with my head. I wish I could have seen him one more time to tell him I gave his water skis and croquet set to Goodwill. If the bank hadn’t taken back his airplane, I would have lost my house and been sleeping in my car. Too bad you didn’t meet Ray. He was an A-to-Z crumb bum.” “I’m terribly sorry to hear about your husband,” David said mechanically. “I don’t think the government is ‘terribly sorry’ to hear about anything. You reading this off a card?” “No, this is just a follow-up to make sure your file stays intact until you receive the benefits you’re entitled to.” “I already have the big one: picturing Ray in hell with his ass en fuego.” “Ah, you speak a bit of Spanish, Mrs. Coelho?” “Everybody in Modesto ‘speaks a bit of Spanish.’ Where you been all your life?” “Washington, D.C.,” David said indignantly. “That explains it,” Mrs. Coelho said, and hung up. Of course he had no car when we met, David thought. No need to leave a paper trail by renting cars or buying tickets on airplanes. He’d got done all he needed to get done on the Modesto library computers, where he and Morsel, two crooks, had found each other and gone into business without ever laying eyes on each other. Before heading to Billings, Morsel had told David how to get to the Indian smallpox burial ground to look for beads. Otherwise, there was nothing to do around here. He wasn’t interested until he discovered the liquor cabinet and by then it was early evening. He found a bottle marked Hoopoe Schnapps, with a picture of a bird on its label, and gave it a try: “Bottoms up.” It went straight to his head. After several swigs, he was unable to identify the bird but he was very happy. The label said that the drink contained “mirabelles,” and David thought, Hey, I’m totally into mirabelles. As he headed for the burial ground, David was tottering a bit. Rounding the equipment shed, he nearly ran into Weldon Case, who walked by without speaking or apparently seeing him. Behind the ranch buildings, a cow trail led into the prairie, then wound toward a hillside spring that didn’t quite reach the surface, visible only by the greenery above it. Just below that was the place that Morsel had told him about, pockmarked with anthills. The ants, Morsel claimed, carried the beads to the surface, but you had to hunt for them. David sat down among the mounds and was soon bitten through his pants. He jumped to his feet and swept the ants away, then crouched, peering and picking at the anthills. His thighs soon ached from squatting, but then he found a speck of sky blue in the dirt, a bead. He clasped it tightly in one hand while stirring with the other and flicking away ants. He didn’t think about the bodies in the ground beneath him. By the time it was too dark to see, his palm was filled with Indian beads and he felt elevated and still drunk. Buy the print » As he passed the equipment shed, he made out first the silhouette of Weldon Case’s Stetson and then, very close, the face of Weldon himself, who gazed at him before speaking in a low voice. “You been in the graves, ain’t you?” “Yes, to look for beads.” “You ought not to have done that, feller.” “Oh? But Morsel said—” “Look up there at the stars.” “I don’t understand.” Weldon reached high over his head. “That’s the crow riding the water snake,” he said, and turned back into the dark. David was frightened. He went to the house and got into bed as quickly as he could, anxious for the alcohol to fade. He pulled the blanket up under his chin, despite the warmth of the night, and watched a moth batting against an image of the moon in the window. When he was nearly asleep, he saw Morsel’s headlights wheel across the ceiling, then turn off. He listened for the car doors, but it was nearly ten minutes before they opened and closed. He rolled close to the wall and pretended to be asleep, while the front door opened quietly. Once the reverberation of the screen-door spring had died down, there was whispering that came into the bedroom. He felt a shadow cross his face as someone peered down at him. Soon the sound of muffled copulation filled the room, stopped for the time it took to raise a window, then resumed. David listened more and more intently, until Ray said, in a clear voice, “Dave, you want some of this?” David stuck to his feigned sleep until Morsel laughed, got up, and walked out with her clothes under her arm. “Night, Ray. Sweet dreams.” The door shut and, after a moment, Ray spoke. “What could I do, Dave? She was after my weenie like a chicken after a June bug.” Snorts, and, soon after, snoring. Morsel stood in the doorway of the house, taking in the early sun and smoking a cigarette. She wore an old flannel shirt over what looked like a body stocking that revealed a lazily winking camel toe. Her eyes followed her father as he crossed the yard very slowly. “Look,” she said, as David stepped up. “He’s wetting his pants. When he ain’t wetting his pants, he walks pretty fast. It’s just something he enjoys.” Weldon came up and looked at David, trying to remember him. He said, “This ain’t much of a place to live. My folks moved us out here. We had a nice little ranch at Coal Bank Landing, on the Missouri, but one day it fell in the river. Morsel, I’m uncomfortable.” “Go inside, Daddy. I’ll get you a change of clothes.” Once the door had shut behind him, David said, “Why in the world do you let him fly that airplane?” “It’s all he knows. He flew in the war and dusted crops. He’ll probably kill himself in the damn thing.” “What’s he do up there?” “Looks for his cows.” “I didn’t know he had cows.” “He don’t. They all got sold years ago. But he’ll look for them long as he’s got fuel.” Morsel turned back to David on her way inside. “I can’t make heads or tails of your friend Ray,” she said. “He was coming on to me the whole time at the cage fights, then he takes out a picture of his wife and tells me she’s the greatest piece of ass he ever had.” “Huh. What’d you say to that?” “I said, ‘Ray, she must’ve had a snappin’ pussy because she’s got a face that would stop a clock.’ He didn’t like that too much. So I punched him in the shoulder and told him he hadn’t seen nothing yet. What’d you say your name was?” “I’m David.” “Well, Dave, Ray says you mean to throw in with us. Is that a fact?” “I’m sure giving it some thought.” David was being less than candid. He would have slipped away the day before if he hadn’t felt opportunity headed his way on silver wings. “You look like a team player to me. I guess that bitch he’s married to will help out on that end. Long as I never have to see her.” David had an unhappy conversation with his mother, but at least it was on the phone, so she couldn’t throw stuff. “The phone is ringing off the hook! Your ranchers are calling constantly, wanting to know when you’ll get there.” “Ma, I know, but I got tied up. Tell them not to get their panties in a wad. I’ll be there.” “David!” she screeched. “This is not an answering service!” “Ma, listen to me. Ma, I got tied up. I’m sparing you the details but relax.” “How can I relax with the phone going off every ten seconds?” “Ma, I’m under pressure. Pull the fucking thing out of the wall.” “Pressure? You’ve never been under pressure in your life!” He hung up on her. He couldn’t live with her anymore. She needed to take her pacemaker and get a room. That week, Morsel was able to get a custodial order in Miles City, based on the danger to the community presented by Weldon and his airplane. Ray had so much trouble muscling Weldon into Morsel’s sedan for the ride to assisted living that big strong David had to pitch in and help Ray tie him up. Weldon tossed off some frightful curses before collapsing in defeat and crying. But the God he called down on them didn’t hold much water anymore, and they made short work of the old fellow. At dinner that night, Morsel was a little blue. The trio’s somewhat obscure toasts were to the future. David looked on with a smile; he felt happy and accepted and believed he was going somewhere. His inquiring looks were met by giddy winks from Morsel and Ray. They told him that he was now a “courier,” and Ray unwound one of his bundles of cash. He was going to California. “Drive the speed limit,” Ray said. “I’m going to get to know the airplane. Take it down to the oil fields. It’s important to know your customers.” “Do you know how to fly it?” This was an insincere question, since David had learned from the so-called widow about Ray’s repossessed plane. “How’s thirteen thousand hours sound to you?” “I’ll keep the home fires burning,” Morsel said, without taking the cigarette out of her mouth. David had a perfectly good idea of what he was going to California for, but he didn’t ask. He knew the value of preserving his ignorance. If he could keep his status as a simple courier, he was no guiltier than the United States Postal Service. “Your Honor, I had no idea what was in the trunk, and I am prepared to say that under oath or take a lie-detector test, at your discretion,” he rehearsed. He drove straight through, or nearly so. He stopped briefly in Idaho, Utah, and Nevada to walk among cows. His manner with cattle was so familiar that they didn’t run from him but gathered around in benign expectation. David sighed and jumped back in the car. He declined to pursue this feeling of regret. It was late when he got into Modesto, and he was tired. He checked into a Super 8 and woke up when the hot light of a California morning shone through the window onto his face. He ate in the lobby and checked out. The directions Ray had given him proved exact: within ten minutes, he was pulling around the house into the side drive and backing into the open garage. A woman came out of the house in a bathrobe and walked past his window without a word. He popped the trunk and sat quietly as she loaded it, then closed it. She stopped at his window, pulling the bathrobe up close around her throat. She wasn’t hard to look at, but David could see you wouldn’t want to argue with her. “Tell Ray I said be careful. I’ve heard from two I.R.S. guys already.” David said nothing at all. He was so cautious that the trip back took longer. He stayed overnight at the Garfield again, so as to arrive in daylight, and got up twice during the night to check on the car. In the morning, he skipped eating at the café for fear he might encounter some of his rancher clients. Plus, he knew that Morsel would take care of his empty stomach. He was so close now that he worried about everything, from misreading the gas gauge to flat tires. He even imagined the trunk flying open for no reason. Now he drove past fields of cattle with hardly a glance. He had imagined a hearty greeting, an enthusiastic homecoming, but the place was silent. A hawk sat on the wire that ran from the house to the bunkhouse, as though it had the place to itself. It flew off reluctantly when David got out of the car. Inside, there were soiled plates on the dining-room table. Light from the television flickered without sound from the living room. David walked in and saw the television first—it was on the shopping network, a closeup of a hand dangling a gold bracelet. Then he saw Morsel on the floor with the channel changer in her hand. She’d been shot. David felt an icy calm. Ray must have done this. He checked the car keys in his pocket and walked out of the house, stopping on the porch to survey everything in front of him. Then he went around to the equipment shed. Where the airplane had been parked in its two shallow ruts lay Ray, also shot, a pool of blood extending from his mouth like a speech balloon without words. He’d lost a shoe. The plane was gone. David felt as if he were trapped between the two bodies, with no safe way back to the car. When he got to it, a man was waiting for him. “I must have overslept. How long have you been here?” He was David’s age, thin and precise in clean khakis and a Shale Services ball cap. He touched his teeth with his thumbnail as he spoke. “Oh, just a few minutes.” “Keys.” “Yes, I have them here.” David patted his pocket. “Get the trunk for me, please.” David tried to hand him the keys. “No, you.” “Not a problem.” David bent to insert the key but his hand was shaking and at first he missed the slot. The lid rose to reveal the contents of the trunk. David didn’t feel a thing.

I’m having lunch with a friend from college days, Michael, with the secret purpose of asking him a favor. It’s not the only reason I’m meeting him. I like Michael, as one does. He’s entertaining. He decides to tell me about his neighbor, Gus— “Gus?” I say. “Are we talking Augustus?” “Gustavus,” Michael says. —who has, apparently, been ill-tempered and hostile for years— “Back up,” I say. “Gustavus? As in Gustavus Adolphus?” “What? He’s Gustavus Goldman. Gus Goldman.” —this guy, this Gus, who lives in the apartment next door to Michael’s and has a history of irascibility and unhelpfulness connected, it would seem, to his alcoholism, this guy has turned over a new leaf and is now a sober, much happier, downright pleasant individual, and for some months has been trying to befriend my friend Michael, and has been Miking him— “Did you say ‘Miking’ you?” Michael says, “You know, ‘Mike’ this, ‘Mike’ that.” “Oh yeah, right.” —Miking him with a view to Michael becoming his pal. But Michael doesn’t want to be pals with Gus. He doesn’t like the guy, even if the guy he doesn’t like has been replaced by an affable non-asshole who sort of merits being befriended and who no doubt would appreciate Michael’s support and affirmation as he ventures down the straight and narrow— “Hold on,” I say. “How was he an asshole? What did he do, exactly?” “Do? He was an asshole. He behaved like an asshole.” “You’re saying he was unneighborly.” “I’m not saying that. I don’t need to say that. I’m saying I’ll be the judge of whether he’s an asshole or not. That’s my prerogative. It’s not an objective test. It doesn’t matter if nine out of ten people think he’s terrific. It doesn’t matter if he’s the greatest neighbor of all time. I get to decide who I’m going be friends with, with my criteria.” “For sure,” I say. “Freedom of association.” Michael, who is an attorney, says, “Well, that’s a slightly different concept.” —anyhow, so Gus is on the wagon, and offering Michael his friendship, and the question that must be answered, even as we never lose sight of the fact that Michael enjoys a basically unqualified freedom to keep whomsoever at whatever distance he sees fit for whatever reason, the question to be answered is— I say, “The answer is no. Don’t do it. An asshole is an asshole. Don’t cave.” —the question to be answered, Michael goes on, isn’t whether he should be Gus’s friend, which is never going to happen, you can’t just undo years and years of being a dick, life just doesn’t work like that, no, the question is how to manage the situation, so that Michael isn’t suddenly the asshole; because, although being an asshole would be within Michael’s rights— “Correct. You get to be an asshole. It’s not illegal.” —being an asshole isn’t what he wants; and, as things stand, it’s Gus who’s the nice guy and it’s Michael who’s the asshole. My friend is bark-laughing. It’s a bark-laugh I remember well, and it’s as if we’re once again at N.Y.U., in the dorm on Thirteenth Street. I say, “Yeah, that’s right, someone has to be the asshole. And it can’t be Gus. Not anymore. He’s turned over a new leaf. Gus is nice now.” Michael says, “It’s like the poker thing. If you look around the table and can’t figure out who the asshole is—guess what? It’s you.” The old back-and-forth is still there, the old badinage, the old rapport; and with pleasure we finish our hamburgers and catch up on each other’s news. Mine is the more interesting news, I would say, what with my interesting divorce and my interesting pennilessness and my interesting loneliness since my recent return to New York from Portland, Oregon, but Michael has anecdotes that he wants to share, and I end up not saying very much, and it’s only at the last minute that I’m able to mention that I’m trying to rent an apartment in Prospect Heights. “It’s a co-op,” I tell him. “They need me to provide character references. Hey, Mike,” I say with the old merrymaking irony, “could you write me one? You’ve got stationery. They’ll like that.” We’re splitting the check: Michael puts the full amount on a law-firm credit card and I pay him my half in cash. “Sure,” he says. We shake hands. “E-mail me.” Which is, when I get back to the office, exactly what I do. Michael replies within the hour: Hi, Rob. On reflection, I don’t think I can do this. I’ve consulted some people here, and they agree that, as a professional matter, a historic collegiate acquaintance is an inadequate basis for a personal reference. It would be a different story if I had firsthand knowledge of your life post-college. I thought it right to let you know as promptly as possible. Michael. What an asshole, I think I can say. It wouldn’t matter except for the fact that it does matter. I need two character references A.S.A.P., and so far I’ve failed to collect a single one. That’s not totally accurate. I’ve got this, from Tariq: To Whom It May Concern: As his work supervisor, I have known Rob Karlsson for two weeks, during which time he has presented as a pleasant and responsible person. I hope this is of assistance. Tariq is British and so maybe is guided by some protocol of understatement I’m not familiar with. Either way, his endorsement, as worded, isn’t what I’m looking for. I’m informed by the apartment lessor, Travis, who’s twenty-six and some kind of junior restaurant manager and yet somehow also a man of property, that the co-operators require (per their forwarded e-mail) “meaningful letters of reference that specifically address the high standards of integrity and deportment expected of a co-operative resident.” I get that it’s a little much to drop this thing on Tariq, but in the short time we’ve known each other we’ve worked well together, and I’d like to think that we’ve made a social connection that’s not unreal over the course of our almost nightly after-work drinks, when he goes from being my superior at the office to being just a dude who would like me to introduce him to a girl who would like to be introduced to him. I can’t help him with this, unfortunately. After the years I’ve spent on the West Coast, my New York contacts are pretty much vestigial. It took some effort to track down Paul, on whose couch I’m currently sleeping, if that’s the right word for what an insomniac does, and I can’t even claim that Paul, my mother’s cousin’s son, was anything like a huge bud in the first place, and in all honesty I tracked down Paul not because he was Paul as such but because the poor devil was the only New Yorker I knew who was likely to be kind enough to let me crash with him until I found somewhere more permanent and suitable. Paul himself essentially lives at his boyfriend’s place, in Manhattan; since the key handover, we’ve laid eyes on each other only once. I’ve of course asked him for a reference and, because he’s a reliable and upstanding person who’s known me (very slightly, admittedly) since we were kids and is technically family, I can count on him to come through, I’m pretty sure, even though his job keeps him very busy and more than a week has passed since he agreed to do the necessary and time is getting to be of the essence. What I mustn’t do is give the wrong kind of credence to the apparent fact that, at the age of thirty-six, I find myself in the position of being unable to easily identify two people who know me well enough to plausibly and candidly state that I’m a sufficiently O.K. human being for the purpose of living in close vicinity to others. That would be a superficial and overly catastrophic way of looking at things. Now this, just in, from Portland: Robert, I’m glad to hear you have found an apartment you like. I’ve been worried about you. It’s good to see that you’re doing fine. I’m going to ask you not to contact me for a long while. It’s unhealthy for us to be involved in each other’s lives. That’s why I’m not going to give you the personal recommendation you asked for. I’m sure you understand. Good luck with everything, Robert. Samantha. Have you asked Billy? I want to write back to Samantha to make it clear that I’m not looking for any further involvement in her life but actually and merely asking for a one-time administrative courtesy. I also want to contest her bare assertion that I’m “doing fine,” which I feel is basically a way to throw a blanket over me and my situation as if I were a small fire that you put out, and—wait: Billy? Billy who? Samantha doesn’t e-mail back. But Travis texts: Got those refs yet? Need to wrap this up. Oh—Billy. Billy is my childhood best friend. We haven’t been in touch for nearly a decade. That’s been my doing, I’ve got to say. Billy came to “N.Y.C.,” as he always called it, in his mid-twenties, not long after he’d belatedly gathered the credits he needed for a business degree from Mankato State, and for a little more than a year he hung out with me and Samantha non-stop, it felt like, and kept hitting on Samantha’s friends with no luck, often implicating me as his “wingman,” and dragged me out to hockey games I absolutely didn’t want to go to. Billy, at this time, worked in sales strategy for a baby-food company in midtown. His dream was to come up with a world-conquering idea for a startup (or “upstart,” as he liked to joke), and he and I spent many evenings drinking beer at my place, when, if we weren’t re-reminiscing about the characters and events of our teen-age years in St. Paul, we were contemplating the magical “synergy” that Billy thought would be achieved by “fusing” his business skills and my computer expertise. Often, I remember, he would tap his skull with his finger and say that it, his skull, contained “the keys to the kingdom.” Meanwhile, Samantha lay low in the bedroom. It was an unsustainable state of affairs. Billy is a lovely, somewhat special guy, no question, and not at all malicious, but his company became intolerably stressful. Also, he developed a habit of reprimanding me. For example, if I voiced a mildly negative thought—“This coffee is too weak,” say, or “I wish those bros would turn down the volume”—Billy would say something like “Dude, chill, you’re getting all snobby in your old age,” and say it with a weird laugh of anger. I kept wishing that my old friend would somehow change or wise up or move on, but if anything he doubled down on who he thought he was, with the result that, in the company of others especially, a kind of cartoon Minnesotan Billy came into being, an extremist of easygoingness who could be counted on to occupy the nice or feel-good side of any issue and make everyone else feel cynical and shitty by comparison. It took a drawn-out and horrible process of rejection by me of him to bring our relationship to an end. I really believe that the trauma surrounding that whole episode is why I was so enthusiastic about leaving the city, where I’d spent eight otherwise happy and productive years, in order to relocate to Portland, where Samantha had a job offer from Wieden+Kennedy and I’d lined up a sweet-looking gig to develop software for a real-life startup that had as its goal the revolutionizing of the logistics industry. Though incommunicado, Billy and I have remained friended on Facebook. That’s how I know he’s still in the tristate area, working as a regional sales director, which sounds hopeful. As does the fact that he’s married, with two daughters. But I really don’t want to be in touch with him again, unless it’s some kind of emergency. Hey, Billy. All good? Looks like I’m back in N.Y.C. Samantha and I have split. Long story. Not good. Can’t talk about it without beers. Listen, can you do me a solid? I’m in a hole. Then I type out my plea for a reference letter, and send it, and go to bed. Travis I’ve texted: No worries. Stand by. This isn’t totally disingenuous. I’ve sent messages to two trustworthy people in Portland: my old startup comrade Halil, and Courtney, who is first and foremost Samantha’s friend but who I hit it off with independently, I feel. It’s not ideal to have out-of-towners as my referees, since there may be a perception that they won’t truly grasp the demanding norms that New York co-operators abide by, but whatever. Cousin Paul, in response to my reminder, e-mails: Hi Rob so sorry about this could you write it for me?? Crazy busy . . . I’ll sign off to whatever you write . . . Thx . . . In the morning, I see that Halil has still not responded. That’s not what I expected. When the startup finally collapsed, which happened roughly at the same second that my marriage did, Halil was the guy who went in for farewell eye-locking, chest-bumping, and expressions like “blood brother” and “muchacho.” Courtney has got back to me: Rob, this is difficult for me to write. This past year I’ve been very close to Sam as she has gone through this difficult time. She has shared many things with me about what her experience has been. I have to say that I’ve found it painful on many levels. I feel bad that I wasn’t able to see what was going on and that I wasn’t there for her when she needed me. I owe her my focus now. So I’m going to have to recuse myself from what you’re asking for. This doesn’t reflect on you at all. This is just about me taking ownership of what I need to do. What does this e-mail even mean? She wants to recuse herself? Who is she, Sonia Sotomayor? I can only control the things I can control. Like writing Paul’s letter. That’s something I can take care of right away. But patting myself on the back, even through an alter ego, is challenging. For support, I go online. There I find plenty of helpful pro-forma character references, though they’re for people in situations different from mine—i.e., people who are applying for jobs or internships or fellowships, not people seeking admission to a residential building. I’ve got to say, I’m a little taken aback. I accept that I’m looking at fictitious documents and persons, but we’re in the realm of realism, surely, and the referrers, however invented, are quite outstanding. Joe is stellar and can-do and masterly and explains complex systems very well. Mary has grit and gentleness, compassion and superb forensic skills. Arturo is loyal, determined, and reasonable. The most powerful commendations tell little stories: how Emily showed terrific leadership during the power outage; how Ken handled an ultra-demanding client with the sensitivity and effectiveness that have come to be expected of him. The letter in support of Annie, written by her high-school teacher, is actually moving in its depiction of a young woman’s industriousness and precocious commitment to social justice. There are a lot of ethical, pleasant, and dependable people notionally out there. It’s intimidating, frankly. I had no idea the bar was so high. When I get home from work, a tiny bit drunk after a few shots with Tariq, there’s a FedEx packet leaning against the door, and I see that it’s for me, and I rip the thing open. It contains an envelope. My name appears on the envelope, in Billy’s beautiful handwriting. I get myself a beer and take a seat at Paul’s kitchen table. Billy: when he came East, he stayed with Samantha and me in Williamsburg until he found a room in Manhattan. Brooklyn was out of the question; he had to have a Manhattan address. It was a question of dignity, I suppose, as was his insistence on having “wheels.” He was probably my only New York friend with a car. This came to an end when he was involved in a small collision on the F.D.R. and had no option but to plead guilty to D.W.U.I. (weed) and accept a one-year revocation of his license. I accompanied Billy to court, wearing a suit and tie in solidarity. Afterward we lit up cigarettes on the steps of the courthouse, even though I’d quit smoking. We had a laugh at the expense of the prosecutor, an unfortunate-looking guy who I’d spotted in the bathroom earlier, mysteriously throwing up. Not much else was talked about. It was a sunny day, and we sat next to each other in our suits and shades, smoking and feeling good and, in our minds, looking good. There was something totally canned and anachronistic about the moment, of course, but it was special nonetheless, and for me the highlight of our friendship’s I’d have to say tragic New York phase. The envelope is high-quality ivory, as is the letter paper, which has been folded into perfect thirds. Billy’s really gone the whole hog. It being an official document, I wash my hands before I open and read it: FUCK. YOU. ASSHOLE. O.K.—that’s not nice. That is really quite hurtful. Although, when I visualize Billy scheming and finessing all the details—the insult, the fancy notepaper, the same-day delivery—I have to smile. It is with great pleasure that I commend Robert Karlsson to you. Robert and I have cohabited in my small apartment for several months. In all candor, it has been an entirely harmonious and agreeable experience. Robert has at all times been quiet, helpful, considerate, tidy, and charming—everything one could hope for in a fellow-resident. This comes as no surprise, since I have known Robert and his family for over twenty years. I vouch for him without hesitation or qualification. Any co-operative should feel fortunate to have him. Please feel free to contact me at any time to discuss this matter further. Yours truly, Paul Robson. How easy was that? I’d even say it was enjoyable. And I don’t think it’s bullshit. Put it this way: I very much doubt that those whom it concerns will complain, down the road, that they were fundamentally misled, because what’s fundamental is what I’m like, not whether some statement about me is a lie that’s either white or off-white. I honestly believe that I’m someone who doesn’t make trouble, certainly not for my neighbors. To Whom It May Concern: Relax. Rob Karlsson will not make your life a misery. I have known him longer than just about anybody, and I should know. This is the guy who, as a fourteen-year-old Boy Scout, went on a two-day hiking trip in the Quetico wilderness with Simon Burch, and carried both his and Simon’s rucksacks on the five-mile return trek to base camp after Simon hurt his back. This is the guy who wouldn’t squeal on Wally Waters after Wally pushed him down the stairs and the principal demanded to know exactly what had happened. This Rob Karlsson is the Bobby Karlsson who pretended he’d hurt his throwing arm so that Carlos Rodriguez could finally pitch an inning. This is whom we’re concerned with here. With the first boy Amanda McAteer kissed, who never mentioned it to anybody, because Amanda didn’t want it to get around. Who in college volunteered for Citymeals-on-Wheels (albeit unreliably and briefly). Who definitely has no criminal record. Who is something of a sinner and a screwup, definitely, but whose “heart is in the right place,” according to a certain person with credibility on this issue. Who is co-operative by nature, as nobody can deny. Who refrains from unkindness when commenting online, even when drunk and using a pseudonym. Who was a good kid, his father once said. Who when little accompanied his father on rambles, and actually grew interested in wildflowers, learning about the common yarrow, the jack-in-the-pulpit, and the spoon-leaf sundew, which he remembers only because of their impressive names and not because they are identifiable by him, which they’re not. Who liked most of all to walk in the forest, in fact liked the word “forest,” though not as much as the word “glade,” and was always asking his father, Dad, is this a glade?

Carrie was alone in the house. It was a Saturday in the mid-nineteen-sixties, and her parents were out shopping: she was ten years old, and doing her piano practice. She had borrowed her parents’ alarm clock and put it on top of the piano to time herself—she had so many twenty-minute practices to make up, it seemed as though she’d have to sit there forever. While she was playing, she often looked up at the clock, willing the time to pass; sometimes she just stared at it stonily, letting her fingers wander at random around the notes. Her younger brother, Paul, had a game of cricket going outside with his gang of friends, on the stretch of worn grass enclosed by railings that was a kind of garden for the whole terrace, although only the children used it. The chock of the ball against the bat and the boys’ voices calling to one another sounded dreamy at this distance, travelling across the road through the summer heat. Every so often a boy appealed—’Owzat!—with sudden violence. Carrie shuddered; it was still cool indoors and she wished she had her cardigan on. This room at the front of the house was always dark, because of the horse-chestnut trees outside the window. They called it the dining room, though they used it for dining only on special occasions, or when her mother had a dinner party; mostly, they watched television in here. A dinner party was planned, in fact, for that night, and the room seemed braced in anticipation: the notes Carrie played fell into an alert silence. The television was in a corner, opposite a low couch covered in olive-green cotton; Carrie’s mother had made the couch covers and also the floor-length curtains and the pelmet at the window, in mustard-yellow velvet. All of the ground floor—the dining room and the kitchen and the hall—was laid with black and white Vinolay tiles, stuck to sheets of hardboard nailed over the old wood floor. Carrie’s parents had done this themselves, in the evenings and on weekends, when her father wasn’t at work—he taught in a secondary-modern school. Not many people in those days were keen to live in these dilapidated Georgian terraced houses, so a schoolteacher and his wife could afford one, if they had imagination and were able to do it up themselves. Carrie’s parents had hired a builder to cut out an archway between the dining room and the hall, but the arch was slightly lopsided, which exasperated Carrie’s mother. She had a vision of the house she wanted, elegant and arty. A bulb in a Japanese white paper globe was suspended on a long flex from the high ceiling. Carrie had turned on this light when she came downstairs to do her practice, and in the daylight it glowed weakly and inhospitably. She was working through the exercises in a book called “A Dozen a Day.” The twelfth and last exercise in each section was “Fit as a Fiddle and Ready to Go,” but Carrie had worn out all the hopefulness she’d felt when she first started piano lessons. She knew that she wasn’t particularly good, and that piano wasn’t the answer she’d hoped for, to what was unsolved in herself. There was something slapdash in the way her mind connected with the sounds that her fingers were making. Also, an uncomfortable thing had happened recently in relation to her piano teacher, who was kind and sensible, with a bosom that quivered in stretch polo-necks. The teacher had liked Carrie at first because she was willing to play modern pieces: most of her pupils preferred to stick with “Beside the Stream” or “A Winter Morning.” But a few weeks ago Carrie had lost a letter that she had written to her best friend, Susan, and she was afraid that she’d dropped it at her piano teacher’s house, though she wasn’t sure. Her teacher hadn’t said anything about it, but that didn’t mean she hadn’t found it. The letter was a joke, one in a series that Carrie and Susan had been writing to each other, full of rude words and innuendo, half learned from the playground and half invented. In the letters they addressed each other as Dug-less and Fanny, and traded insults. Dear Fanny, Guess what? P.A. told me that you asked him to show you his thingy. He said you really liked it, and wanted to touch it! Then you cried when he wouldn’t let you. Boo hoo! Outwardly, Carrie and Susan were not at all like the clowning raucous characters in the letters: they were quiet girls, shy and hardworking. The boy in their jokes was always the same one: a fat boy in their class, who was their enemy. He banged down their desk lids on their heads, pretended to waft away their bad smells, asked if they were wearing itchy knickers. The letters had seemed richly and mysteriously funny, until the joy was tainted by Carrie’s having to imagine her piano teacher reading one. Bitterly, she addressed herself, frown lines cut deep between her eyes, to one of Bartók’s children’s pieces, breaking it down as she was supposed to, practicing the left hand first, over and over. There was a relief in pounding the repeated chords, which were neither contented nor plangent. Her right hand lay curled in her lap, palm upward, a useless and discarded thing, and she swung her legs under the piano stool as she concentrated: a sharp-faced little scrap of a girl, blotted with freckles, straight hair pushed out of the way behind sticking-out ears. She looked like her father’s side of the family, thin and strong-boned, and didn’t much resemble her opulently attractive mother, who was shapely, with wide hazel eyes and a full mouth. It was Paul who looked like their mother. Above the dining-room fireplace was a gilt-framed mirror that their mother had found in a junk shop and repaired; she had also made lamps out of old glass demijohns and pottery bottles, with her own silk shades. The grate in the fireplace was filled all year round with dried flowers and a gold paper fan: no one wanted real fires when you could have central heating. In photographs now, those arty sixties rooms look unexpectedly austere; their effects seem sparse and rickety, amateurish, in comparison with the fat tide of spending and decorating that came later. But that innocence is appealing, and not incongruous with the high-ceilinged Georgian rooms, always painted white. The doorbell rang, tearing into Carrie’s solitude. She felt herself reprieved—she had done almost an hour’s practice, and there was still tomorrow. It might be her parents, back already from Sainsbury’s, or Paul, coming in from across the road, to look for another ball or to get a drink of water. When he ran in from his games, sometimes he drank straight from the tap in the kitchen, making a great show of his wild heat and thirst, cocking his head under the flow, letting the water soak his hair, his eyes rolling back as if he were delirious with physical effort. On her way out through the crooked archway, Carrie caught sight of her reflection in another mirror, above the Pembroke table in the hall, with its bowl of unmatched gloves left over from winter and its jug filled with silvery dried honesty. The outer front door stood open, as it always did in the daytime; the inner door was made of rippled glass. A man was leaning against the glass on the other side, his bulk blocking the light. He was peering inside through his cupped hands to see if anyone was at home. Carrie dreaded any encounter with a stranger and wished she hadn’t let herself be seen. Suffering, she fumbled with the lock, as the man stepped back. When she swung the door open, she discovered that he wasn’t a stranger after all but someone who didn’t come to the house often enough for her to have recognized his outline. Dom Smith was a friend of her parents who had moved to another city some time ago, to a new job at a university. Her parents would be so disappointed to miss Dom. He was a favorite of theirs, clever and handsome, an anthropologist, with a young family. Carrie’s mother talked about him in the cherishing, appreciative tone that she reserved for certain people she admired, mostly men, mostly just out of reach on the margins of their acquaintance; she liked the idea of Dom’s life, with its aura of bohemianism and its promise of good conversation. She liked his wife, Helen, too, but they’d seen less of her. Once, Helen had lived with Dom among the tribal peoples in Assam, but when he’d visited here she often stayed at home with their babies. Dom puzzled down at Carrie, perhaps only vaguely remembering her existence, certainly not her name. In his shabby reefer jacket, he seemed too warmly dressed for the summer day; she could smell his sweat. If only her parents had been at home, she could have tagged on behind their welcome, basking invisibly at the edge of all the talk: Dom put them in touch with something glamorous. Her father enjoyed their noisy quarrels over music (Dom liked classical, her father liked jazz), in which neither of them gave an inch. Dom had the kind of physique that makes a man seem fearless—he was huge and rumpled, with untidy black curls and a beard, a big affable voice. You could easily imagine him living in a hut in Assam, with people who kept the bones of their ancestors under the floor. In actuality, he was more diffident and awkward than his physique suggested. He told Carrie that he was in town for a couple of days, looking up old friends. Were her parents anywhere around? “They’re out at the shops,” she said. “You could come in and wait.” He hesitated and cast a look back into the street, almost as if he were being pursued. “How long d’you think they’ll be?” Surely they’d been gone for hours? They would be back very soon, Carrie reassured him, eager to coax him inside. Yet, as soon as he stepped across the threshold into the dim interior, she felt how inadequate she was to entertain him. Her parents’ friends might play significant roles in her imagination, but left alone with them she had nothing to offer. Dom’s towering presence was confounding; he stood with his back to the hall mirror, obliterating her reflection and surveying the place, as if to remind himself where he was. They both seemed at a loss. “Were you playing the piano?” he asked politely. “Why don’t you go ahead?” It would be unbearable to play while he was listening. Carrie gabbled something about reading her book and fled upstairs; her cowardice was crucifying. But she knew that as soon as her parents came back from the shops the tide of their pleased sociability would lift her with it; she’d be all right. Skulking behind the open door of the playroom, she listened to Dom moving around downstairs. They called this room the playroom because there was a table-tennis table in it, which her father had rescued when the school was throwing it out. Her mother kept her sewing machine there, too, and the table was spread with the cut-out and pinned pieces of a dress she was making for one of the ladies she sewed for. Dom went into the kitchen and must have sat still for a bit because she couldn’t hear him. Then he pushed back a chair and began pacing again, in and out of the dining room, back to the kitchen; Carrie felt guiltily responsible for his restlessness. She took off her sandals so that she wouldn’t make a sound; he mustn’t know that she was wandering upstairs, prickling with consciousness of his wanderings below. Several times she tiptoed to the windows in the lounge, to see whether her parents’ car was pulling up; its continuing absence was a drawn-out physical pain. To appease this, after a while she got out her shoebox full of the collectible cards that came free with packets of tea, then sat down at the table-tennis table and began doggedly pasting these into their places in her albums. She was saving British Butterflies and Great Engineers. Dom meandered into the dining room again. It was strange that a grown man could be reduced to the listlessness of a child, waiting for something that didn’t come. He sat down at the piano and began to play. The piece was much too advanced to be in any of the books she had, so it must have been something he knew by heart. His playing seemed like a solution to their impasse while they waited; Carrie put down her pot of paste and crept out of the playroom, sitting at the top of the stairs to listen, hugging her stomach, feeling the music for once as if it were inside her. It was the tiny scope of her Bartók piece, she saw now, that made it suitable for children. This different music rolled and rippled up and down the notes, joyous and mournful, lingering and delaying, holding back with painful sweetness. Carrie was in awe of Dom Smith’s adult competence, so rich in understanding; she couldn’t imagine attaining it in any lifetime. Then he broke off abruptly in the middle of the piece, pushing back the piano stool as if he were angry with it and striding out into the hall, where he hesitated before calling upstairs. “Hello?” He was going to go; she should never have tried to keep him there in the first place—the only surprise was his even remembering that she was in the house. When he called, she didn’t answer right away, not wanting him to know that she’d been listening from the stairs. And at that very moment her parents arrived home from the supermarket: she heard their voices first, then a key in the lock and the noise rolling in from the street. Her mother exclaimed in shock at finding Dom Smith in her hall, on the point of leaving. “Dom! What a lovely surprise! Did Carrie let you in?” “I was just about to give up on you,” he said. Carrie bounded downstairs, to be present at the happy greetings. She knew that her mother would be quickly calculating, standing among the plastic carriers from the supermarket, rearranging her plans to make room for Dom, running through what preparation was still needed for the dinner party. Her timetable leading up to these events was tightly organized, and she worked through it with fierce energy and efficiency, but she could make lightning adjustments, too. All this time she was showing Dom her brightly delighted face. She was genuinely pleased that he had come. “I told him to wait,” Carrie said, hanging onto her mother’s arm and stretching out her feet in the new ballet moves that Susan had taught her. She was performing for him now that she was safe. “I knew you wouldn’t be long.” “I’m down for a few days,” Dom said. “I came for a rugby game and I thought I’d catch up with people.” “Tell me again about the time before the sands came.”Buy the print » He stood awkwardly in their way in his thick dark coat, stubborn, as if he lacked the fluency to explain himself further but didn’t care. It was hard to believe that such marvellous music had poured out of him, only a few minutes earlier. Carrie’s father, his extreme thinness and height making him look martyred under the weight of more shopping bags, was thankful for male company after a morning at the supermarket. Paul ran in from across the road and began hunting through the carriers for a packet of crisps, glancing only once at their visitor, then hurrying out again, fairly oblivious of his family’s social life. Carrie’s father asked about the rugby, while her mother turned on the coffee percolator and unpacked the perishables into the fridge. The grownups sat down around the kitchen table to drink their coffee, and Carrie pulled up a stool to sit beside her mother, delighted with Dom’s presence now, as if it were her own achievement. Her mother tore open a packet of chocolate truffles in his honor, but he shook his head. Carrie was allowed just one. No doubt they’d been intended for the dinner party. “So how are things?” her father cheerfully asked. “I have to tell you straight away,” Dom said. Helen, his wife, had died suddenly of meningitis in the spring. She had gone to bed one night complaining of backache, Dom had called an ambulance the next morning, and she had died at the hospital the following day. Now Helen’s mother was helping Dom look after the children, because he had to work. Carrie’s family hadn’t heard anything about this. In those days, news didn’t travel so fast; lots of people didn’t even have telephones. And her parents didn’t really have many friends in common with the Smiths. In fact, after this one momentous visit when he brought his news, Carrie’s family didn’t see Dom again for a long time. He stayed that day for hours, sitting with Carrie’s parents at the kitchen table. Carrie crept upstairs, to be where she couldn’t hear them talking in their stricken, changed voices, but she couldn’t get rid of the terrible knowledge that Dom had brought; it seemed to be stuck inside her, in her stomach or her throat. Her bedroom was high up in the attic, under the roof baking in the sun, hot even with the windows wide open; in summer the weedy, sour smell of the rush matting on the floor was overpowering. She knelt on it, punishing herself, until its corded pattern was printed as red welts in the flesh of her bare knees. If only she hadn’t let Dom Smith into the house. She tried not to remember him announcing his news, in those oddly hearty, premeditated sentences; his words cut across the bright air of her bedroom in stark flashes, darkening it. Her parents’ jolly hospitality had been stalled mid-gesture; Carrie saw her mother holding the percolator at a slant but not pouring, surprising tears brimming into her hazel eyes, as if they had been waiting for this moment, close beneath the surface. Her father, in his role as the man of the house, was the first to struggle, heroically clumsy, to say something. Her mother had just let out a cry, as if it were she who was wounded. Carrie took everything to heart. She was earnest and susceptible, suffering easily. But it wasn’t exactly pity for Helen Smith or her husband or children that overwhelmed her as she knelt in her bedroom; it was something more selfish and self-protective. She wished fiercely that she’d never learned about Helen’s death. Helen didn’t seem the right person to be singled out. She had been tiny and plump and hopeful, with soft brown hair and a pleasant ringing voice. But now the idea of death closed on her in Carrie’s imagination, like a trap. Her image and her name had been transformed by Dom’s announcement, and were framed with sorrow, could never be dissociated from it. Helen’s children had still been small when the Smiths moved away; Carrie had hardly known them. Before the Smiths left, the two families had gone for a walk together in some woods, and Carrie remembered that Dom had carried his younger daughter in a backpack, which wasn’t common then. The thong had broken on one of Helen’s sandals and she’d had to keep bending down to adjust it. After the walk, they had gone back to the Smiths’ flat for tea, and Helen had fried Scotch pancakes, which they ate hot with butter. The flat was on a steep hill, overlooking the river and the docks below; it was shabby and comfortable, untidy with books and baby apparatus. Carrie’s mother had said on the way home that the flat could have been made very nice, but Helen Smith wasn’t interested in that sort of thing. She’d said this defensively, as if Helen had actually reproached her for her frivolous concern with appearances. This morning, the memory of that walk had been jumbled carelessly among all Carrie’s other memories; now it had to be separated from the rest, darkened with foreboding. She felt guiltily relieved that those smitten children lived in another city, far away. The sensations of her long vigil alone with Dom Smith in the house were vividly present still; she was shrivelled and humiliated by the foolish excitement she had felt at keeping him waiting, then offering her family to him like a bright gift. Peering in through the glass door, then blundering around in the shadows downstairs, Dom was turned into a figure of dread by what had happened to him. He was set apart, just as his wife had been set apart—except that it was worse with Dom, because he persisted, discomforting in all his living bulk, putting himself in the way of Carrie’s thoughts when she tried to be rid of him. She longed to hear the door shut behind him and for the dinner-party preparations to be resumed, however belatedly—for the whole ordinary process of living to start into motion again, downstairs in the kitchen. It was a lovely evening, very still. The house filled up with the smell of meat stewing slowly in wine. Slanting yellow light, thick with dancing midges, pooled under the horse chestnuts outside. The floor-length sash windows were thrown up in the lounge, and after the guests had finished eating they came upstairs to sit there in the twilight, smoking and drinking. Two men started a game of table tennis in the playroom, slamming the ball down hard, exploding with shouts of triumph or defeat. There was jazz music on the gramophone in the lounge, and a blackbird competed in a tree outside; some of the guests came out to smoke on the white-painted wrought-iron balcony, where Carrie’s mother grew nicotiana and petunias and white lobelia, in pots and in the halves of a barrel sawn in two. Cigarette smoke and the smell of flowers, together with the uninterpretable mingled voices and laughter from inside the room, floated up to where Carrie watched, unseen, from the open window in her parents’ bedroom, on the floor above. She and her brother were supposed to be asleep in their rooms in the attic. But Carrie was spying on the dinner party and Paul was sitting up in bed in his thin cotton pajamas, his skin darkly tanned from the days outdoors, his hair bleached a striking yellow gold. Carrie knew that he was writing his weather report in a notebook—sunny, some high cumulus, 68°F, no precipitation—and flipping back through its pages to where things got more interesting: his record-low temperature for the year, heaviest rainfall, days of hail or thunder. He would be murmuring certain words over to himself, incantatory: the leaden sky promised an early fall of snow. Carrie had found the stupid letter that she’d thought was lost, tucked into the pocket of a cardigan put away in her drawer. She had dived on it with a little private cry of pain, then torn it up quickly without reading it, burying the fragments in her wastepaper bin. Of course she was relieved; certain scenes at her piano teacher’s house could now be wiped clean of the taint of her teacher’s knowledge. Yet her relief was trivial, because the problem of the lost letter had been displaced by something quite incommensurate with it. Resolutely, Carrie refused to let thoughts of the Smiths into the foreground of her attention. At least Dom was gone now, and she could begin to forget about him; the time they’d spent in the house together shamed her, as if she’d been witness to some unseemly grief. Her mother had tried to persuade Dom to come back for the dinner party, and he’d promised to think about it, but she’d said afterward that she was sure he wouldn’t come—it would be unbearable under the circumstances for him to mix with strangers, or people he hardly knew. Carrie couldn’t tell from her mother’s voice whether she was glad that Dom wouldn’t come, or sorry. But surely he would have ruined things—what could they have laughed at, if he’d brought his weight of sadness in among them? His visit had disrupted her mother’s plans, but still she had got everything ready on time, working under pressure with a severe, set face: the table had been laid beautifully with its blue-and-brown-checked cloth and red stemmed glasses and red paper napkins; the glazed vol-au-vents were filled and ready for the oven; the chocolate pudding was set in its palisade of sponge fingers, piped with whipped cream; the candles were on the table with their box of matches. Carrie’s father was studying, in the evenings and on weekends, for a degree in politics, but on the day of a party he had to leave his books and submit to the different laws of the female domain, obeying the instructions that his wife rapped out, vacuuming and tidying, setting up the drinks tray. She followed impatiently after him, because he had no feeling for arranging the cushions or the flowers; he thought these things were not worth having a feeling for. The children exchanged sly looks and jokes with their father behind their mother’s back, conspiring against her remorselessness. But as soon as the guests arrived she relaxed into smiles, as if that other, sterner self had never existed. In the half-dark now, feeling the evening air against her nakedness under her nightdress, Carrie fingered the objects on her mother’s dressing table, so well known they seemed like parts of her own self: the amber necklace with its knotted waxy thread, the prickly dried sea horse someone had brought from Greece, a cylinder needle case of polished wood, a bottle of the Basic Dew that her mother used on her face. The coral brooch, with its fine gold safety chain and extra pin, had belonged to her mother’s own mother; a black lacquer box was painted with forget-me-nots and had a poem pasted inside the lid. This bedroom was never as perfectly tidy as the rooms downstairs. There were stray halfpennies and dressmaker’s pins in the dust on the dressing table, neglected letters in manila envelopes were propped against the mirror, and one of Paul’s football boots was wrapped in a plastic bag, waiting to be repaired. Some meaning was hidden in these mute things Carrie touched: twisting the top off the needle case, she tested the blunt ends of a few rusty needles, pressing hard and then harder, until the needles made white dents in her fingertips. Then, when she looked out of the window again to check on the party, she saw to her horror that Dom Smith was standing out on the balcony below, with his back to her. So he had turned up after all. It was Dom, she realized now, who had been playing table tennis with her father, yelling and cursing and shouting with glee, throwing himself about the room as if the only thing he cared about were winning. Now he was alone, leaning hunchbacked over the railing in the shadows between the two lit windows, his shoulders broad in his checked shirt, whose sleeves were rolled up, businesslike, to the elbows. While she watched, he threw his cigarette down into the street. Carrie’s mother stepped out onto the balcony through one of the windows; the noise of the party carried on in the room behind her. Carrie saw that her mother didn’t really know Dom well, and was uncertain whether she ought to approach him. Her sleeveless white dress, which she had made herself, gleamed in the twilight. She must have kicked off her white shoes in the lounge; it was one of the things she did when she was tipsy. Hesitant, she moved toward him, and he turned his head to look at her. “Dom, I don’t know what to say. Poor, lovely Helen. It’s too awful.” Where they were standing, between the two windows, they weren’t visible from inside the lounge, but Carrie saw what happened next. Dom grabbed hold of her mother—not suavely and sexily, like one of those flirty men who were always grabbing at her, but clumsily, half smothering her. The top of her head only just came up to his chin, but he squeezed her tightly and nuzzled under her ear, as if he wanted to burrow down into her. Her mother was taken by surprise; she staggered backward under Dom’s weight and at the same time patted his shoulder as if she were comforting him. “Help me,” he was saying to her. The words were muffled because his face was buried in her neck. “You’ve had too much to drink,” she said tenderly. “You’re not making any sense.” For a while the two of them clung together, circling slowly on the creaky planks of the balcony as if they were dancing. He was pressing the huge palm of his hand against her head, stroking her tousled hair, clasping her head against his chest, kissing the top of it, kissing her ear. Carrie felt as if she weren’t really present at the scene; she was disembodied. She believed that, even if they’d looked up to where she was craning out of the window above them, they wouldn’t have been able to see her. Then her mother, with her hand flat on Dom’s chest, was pushing him away in the teasing, charming way she pushed away the other men. “No, Dom,” she said sweetly. “I’m sorry.” Quietly, Carrie stepped away from the window and went upstairs. She pictured herself making a joke at breakfast the next day about her mother dancing on the balcony with Dom Smith, and then she knew she mustn’t, and grew hot with the memory of the rude letter, her wrong judgment of what was funny and what was shaming. Paul was still sitting up in bed in the room next to hers. He snapped his notebook shut when she came in. “Get out,” he said. “I’m doing something.” Carrie ignored him and stretched out her leg, pulling up her nightdress to her knees, pointing her toes and practicing ballet moves in the narrow space between Paul’s bed and his collection of empty cereal boxes stacked against the wall. She had given up her ballet lessons; she wasn’t really any better at ballet than at the piano. An insect flew in through the open window and landed on the cover of Paul’s book. “I can see his eyes,” he said, peering closely. “They’re like little blobs of ink, gold ink. He’s looking right back at me.” Then their mother, barefoot, was standing in the doorway. “What are you up to?” she said crossly. “You two are supposed to be in bed.” But she didn’t seem to be in any hurry to get back to her guests. She began picking up the clothes that Paul had dropped on the floor and folding them. Carrie kept very still, with one foot pointing and her arms curved in an arabesque above her head: it occurred to her suddenly that her mother was afraid of Dom Smith, too, unwilling to return downstairs, where he was lying in wait with his grief and his hunger for consolation. “Look, Mummy,” Paul said. “Come and look at this.” The three of them bent together over the insect, whose frail folded wings were transparent and dark-veined. Its long green body curled and uncurled lasciviously. “What an extraordinary creature,” their mother said. Pressing close against her, Carrie breathed in her perfume, and the wine and smoke on her hot skin; the white dress smelled of ironing. Paul blew gently at the insect, which swayed on its threads of legs. Their happiness in that moment was almost too much—its precariousness squeezed Carrie’s chest like a tight band. A breeze stirred in the horse-chestnut trees beyond the casement windows, and a street lamp glowing through the foliage was a glassy lozenge, like a sucked barley sugar. Already, Carrie hardly knew if she’d actually seen Dom dancing on the balcony with her mother, or if that had happened only in her imagination, a vision of what consolation might be—something headlong and reckless and sweet, unavailable to children.

It all began when the genie came out of the Magic Milk bottle and asked me what I would prefer: to have a Picasso or to be Picasso. He could grant me either wish but, he warned me, only one of the two. I had to think about it for quite a while—or, rather, he obliged me to think about it. Folklore and literature are so full of stories about greedy fools who are punished for their haste it makes you think those offers are all too good to be true. There are no records or reliable precedents on which to base a decision, because this sort of thing happens only in stories or jokes, so no one has ever really thought about it seriously; and in the stories there’s always a trick, otherwise it would be no fun and there would be no story. At some point, we’ve all secretly imagined this happening. I had it all worked out, but only for the classic “three wishes” scenario. The choice the genie had given me was so unexpected, and one of the options was so definitive, that I needed some time to weigh them up. It was a strange choice but not inappropriate; in fact, it was particularly apt. I was leaving the Picasso Museum, in a state of rapture and boundless admiration, and at that moment I could not have been offered anything, or any two things, that would have tempted me more. I hadn’t actually left the museum yet. I was in the garden, sitting at one of the outdoor tables, having gone to the café and bought a little bottle of the Magic Milk that I’d seen tourists drinking everywhere. It was (it is) a perfect autumn afternoon: gentle light, mild air, and still a while to go before dusk. I took my notebook and pen from my pocket to make some notes, but in the end I didn’t write anything. I tried to put my ideas in order. I silently repeated the genie’s words: to have a Picasso or to be Picasso. Who wouldn’t want to have a Picasso? Who would turn down a gift like that? But, on the other hand, who wouldn’t want to have been Picasso? Was there a more enviable fate in modern history? Not even the privileges of supreme worldly power are comparable to what he had, because they can be removed by political events or wars, while the power of Picasso, transcending that of any president or king, was invulnerable. Anyone else in my place would have preferred the second option, which included the first, not only because Picasso could paint all the Picassos he liked but also because it’s well known that he kept a lot of his own paintings, including some of the best (the museum I’d just visited had been founded with his personal collection), and in his later years he even bought back works that he’d sold as a young man. This inclusion did not, of course, exhaust the advantages of being transformed into Picasso, not by a long shot: the “being” went far beyond the “having,” taking in all the protean joys of creation, stretching away to an unimaginable horizon. “Being Picasso,” in the wake of the real-life Picasso—whatever he was really like—meant being a Superpicasso, a Picasso raised to the power of magic or miracle. But I knew my geniuses (je m’y connaissais en fait de génies), and I could tell or guess that it wasn’t quite so simple. There were good reasons to hesitate, and even to recoil in horror. In order to become someone else, one has to cease being oneself, and no one willingly consents to that surrender. Not that I considered myself to be more important than Picasso, or healthier, or better equipped to face life. He had been fairly unstable (I knew that much from the biographies), but not as unstable as me, so by becoming him I would improve the state of my mental health to some degree. Still, thanks to a lifetime’s patient efforts, I had made peace with my neuroses, fears, anxieties, and other handicaps, or at least reached a point where I could keep them under control, and there was no guarantee that this partial cure would work with Picasso’s problems. That was more or less my reasoning, although I didn’t put it into words; it was just a series of hunches. Fundamentally, this was an extreme case of the problem of identification, which is raised not only by the master of Málaga but by every artist one admires or venerates or studies. The problem goes beyond Picasso, and yet remains within him, too. Identification is one of those things which can’t be generalized. There is no identification in general, as a concept, only identification with this or that figure in particular. And if the figure is Picasso, as in this case, there can be no other. The concept turns itself inside out, as if we were to say (although it’s a clumsy way to put it) that it’s not about “identifying with Picasso” but about “Picassifying identification.” Few individuals have inspired so much writing; everyone who came into contact with Picasso left a testimony, an anecdote, or a character sketch. One is almost bound to find a common trait. For example, I’ve read that he had a problem with action. He would see a piece of paper lying on the floor of his studio, and it would bother him, but he wouldn’t pick it up, and the piece of paper could lie there for months. Exactly the same thing happens to me. It’s like a tiny, incomprehensible taboo, a paralysis of the will, which keeps me from doing what I want to do, and does so indefinitely. Picasso overcompensated for this with his frenetic production of art, as if by painting picture after picture he could make the piece of paper pick itself up. Whatever the reason, there was no doubting the continuity of his production, through all his metamorphoses. Picasso was only Picasso insofar as he was a painter, so if I were Picasso I could paint all the Picassos I liked, and sell them and get rich, and maybe (since the rich can do anything these days) stop being Picasso if I felt trapped in a life I wasn’t enjoying. That’s why I said that the gift of “being” included that of “having.” Picasso once said, “I’d like to be rich, so I could live in peace, like the poor.” Setting aside the deluded belief that the poor have no problems, there’s something odd about the remark: he was rich already when he made it, very rich. But not as rich as he would be now, thirty years after his death, with the rise in the price of his paintings. Everyone knows that painters have to die, and therefore stop producing, for their work to become really valuable. So there was an economic gulf between “being Picasso” and “having a Picasso,” as there is between life and death. The remark about living in peace, leaving aside its facile ingenuity, could be applied to the situation in which the genie had placed me; it was a message from beyond the grave, sent in the knowledge that my dearest wish was for a truly peaceful life, without problems. Given the current prices, and the relative modesty of my aspirations, a single painting would be enough to make me rich and allow me to live in peace, writing my novels, relaxing, and reading. . . . My mind was made up. I wanted a Picasso. No sooner had the thought formed in my mind than a painting appeared on the table, without anybody’s noticing; by then, the people who had been occupying the neighboring tables had got up and walked away, and the others had their backs to me, as did the waitresses at the café. I held my breath, thinking, It’s mine. “Maybe you’d better go ahead and order for me.”Buy the print » It was splendid: a medium-sized oil painting from the thirties. For a long time, I gazed at it intently. At first glance, it was a chaos of dislocated figures, a superposition of lines and wild but fundamentally harmonious colors. Then I became aware of the beautiful asymmetries that leaped out at the viewer, then hid, then reappeared elsewhere, then concealed themselves again. The impasto, the brushwork (it had been painted alla prima), was a masterly demonstration of the assurance that can be achieved only by unself-conscious virtuosity. But the painting’s formal qualities were merely an invitation to explore its narrative content, which began to reveal itself little by little, as if I were decoding hieroglyphics. First, there was a flower, a crimson rose, emerging from the multiple Cubist planes of its petals; facing it, like a mirror image, was a jasmine in virginal whites, painted in Renaissance style, except for the right-angled spirals of its tendrils. In a collision of figure and ground, typical of Picasso, the space between was filled with little snail-men and goat-men, wearing plumed hats, doublets and breeches, or armor; one wore a fool’s cap and bells; there were nude figures, too, dwarflike and bearded. Over this court scene presided a figure who must have been the queen, to judge by her crown: a monstrous broken-down queen, like a damaged toy. Rarely had the distortion of the female body, one of Picasso’s trademarks, been taken to such an extreme. Legs and arms stuck out of her any old how, her navel and her nose were chasing each other across her back, the windmill of her torso was inlaid with the multicolored satins of her dress, and one foot, encased in an enormous high-heeled shoe, shot up skyward. . . . Suddenly, the plot revealed itself to me. I was looking at an illustration of a traditional Spanish fable, or, rather, a joke, and a joke of the most primitive and puerile variety; it must have come back to Picasso from his early childhood. The joke is about a lame queen, who’s unaware of her handicap, and whose subjects don’t dare tell her about it. The Minister of the Interior finally comes up with a strategy for tactfully letting her know. He organizes a floral competition, in which all the kingdom’s gardeners compete with their finest specimens. A jury of specialists narrows the field down to two finalists: a rose and a jasmine. The final decision, the choice of the winning flower, is up to the queen. In a grand ceremony, with the whole court in attendance, the minister places the two flowers before the throne, and, addressing his sovereign in a clear, loud voice, says, “Su Majestad, escoja,” which means “Your Majesty, choose,” but also, if the last word is broken up, “Your Majesty is lame.” The tale’s humorous tone was translated visually by the multicolored tangle of gaping courtiers, by the stocky minister raising his index finger (which was bigger than the rest of him), and, above all, by the queen, composed of so many intersecting planes that she seemed to have been extracted from a pack of cards folded a hundred times over, refuting the idea that nine is the maximum number of times a piece of paper can be folded in half. The fable had some intriguing features, which gave Picasso’s decision to turn it into an image further layers of significance. First, the fact that the protagonist was lame and didn’t know it. It’s possible to be unaware of many things about oneself (for example, to take the case at hand, the fact that one is a genius), but it’s hard to imagine how this could extend to an obvious physical defect like lameness. Perhaps the explanation lay in the protagonist’s regal condition, her status as the One and Only, which prevented her from judging herself by normal physical standards. The One and Only, as there had been only one Picasso. There was something autobiographical about the painting and about the idea of basing it on a childish joke that he must have heard from his parents or his schoolmates, and even about the implicit use of his mother tongue, without which the joke wasn’t funny and made no sense. The picture dated from a time when Picasso had been in France for thirty years and had completely adapted to the language and the culture; it was curious, to say the least, that he had resorted to Spanish to provide the key to a work that was otherwise incomprehensible. Perhaps the Spanish Civil War had renewed a patriotic streak in him, and this painting was a kind of secret homage to his homeland, torn apart by the conflict. Perhaps, and this need not exclude the previous hypothesis, the root of the work was a childhood memory, which had lived on as a debt to be repaid when his art had acquired a sufficient degree of power and freedom. By the thirties, after all, Picasso had been recognized as the preëminent painter of asymmetrical women: complicating the reading of an image by introducing a linguistic detour was just another means of distortion, though crowned, in this case, by its application to a queen. There was a third hypothesis, on a different level from the first two, which took the painting’s supernatural origins into account. Up until then, no one had known that it existed; its enigma, its secret, had remained intact until it materialized before me, a Spanish speaker, an Argentine writer devoted to Duchamp and Roussel. In any case, it was a unique piece, singular even among the works of an artist for whom singularity was the rule; it could hardly fail to fetch a record price. Before embarking on one of my habitual fantasies about future prosperity, I took a little more time to enjoy contemplating the masterwork. I smiled. This crooked little queen, who had to be put together again from a whirl of tangled limbs, was touching, with her biscuitlike face (once you found it), her golden chocolate-wrapper crown, and her puppet’s hands. She was the center of a centerless space. The round of courtiers, a veritable gallery of painterly miracles, was waiting for her choice; the evanescence of the flowers was a reminder of time, which for her was not a duration but an instant of understanding, a final realization, after a lifetime of illusion. A crueller version of the joke can be imagined: the queen has always known that she’s lame (how could she not know?), but good manners have prevented her subjects from broaching a topic that she prefers to avoid. One day, her ministers dare one another to say it to her face. This may be more realistic, but it’s not what the painting represented. No one would make that queen the butt of a joke; no one would mock her. The courtiers all loved her, and wanted her to know it. Beneath the surface message (“choose”), the hidden message (“is lame”) was meant for her: she would hear it and then, in a flash of insight, understand why the world rocked when she walked, why the hems of her dresses were cut on the diagonal, and why the lord chamberlain rushed to give her his arm each time she had to descend a staircase. They had resorted to the language of flowers, that eternal vehicle for messages of love. She had to choose the most beautiful flower in the kingdom, just as I had been obliged to choose between the two gifts offered by the genie. . . . And at that moment my flash of insight came, freezing the smile on my face. Why this hadn’t occurred to me before I couldn’t understand, but all that mattered was that it was occurring to me now. As in a nightmare, an insoluble problem loomed, engulfing me in anxiety. I was still inside the museum: sooner or later I would have to leave; my life as a rich man could begin only outside. And how could I leave the Picasso Museum with a Picasso under my arm?

My father was a suspicious man—and, as a widower, wounded, too. My mother died when I was ten, and he became overly concerned about my welfare. He showed it in the following way: he’d take me by the chin, lift my head, and smell it, as though examining a melon for ripeness. He was checking for cigarette smoke or a girl’s perfume, the reek of the poolroom or a back alley, for the odor of disobedience. He never smelled anything. Even so, to test me he’d say, “Where?,” meaning, “Where have you been?” He was thrifty in all ways, with money, with time; he always tore a stick of chewing gum in half and put the other half in his pocket for later. And he made sure to use the fewest words possible. If he wanted me to move out of the way, he said, “Shift,” or if I asked for a favor he said, “Never.” He hated explanations. Gruff with me, but talkative with customers at the shoe store that he owned, he seemed to me to be two people. That didn’t surprise me. I was also two people: the obedient son tidying the store and sorting shoe sizes, and, out of my father’s sight, someone else—I was not sure who, but certainly not the person he was used to. All through high school I worked for him at the shoe store, hating every minute of it. He claimed that he needed me, but business was slow—“slack” was how he’d put it—and I knew that he wanted me there only to keep me out of trouble. His letterhead said “Louis Lecomte & Son,” which looked important, but the reality was my father dozing in one of the customers’ chairs and me in the basement stacking shoeboxes. The way my father worried about me made me think I was dangerous. I could hear the tremor in his voice when he called out, “Albert!” If I didn’t reply, he’d call again, “Al!,” then “Bertie!,” with growing alarm—where was I?—until at last I said, “Yuh?,” and he was calmed. Cruel of me to delay like that, but I felt trapped. I missed all the school football games. I never joined a team, because I couldn’t take time off to practice. I couldn’t hang around Brigham’s ice-cream parlor after school, looking for action. My father had succeeded. Sometimes I felt very young, other times like an old man: no action for me. As a menial (I worked for pocket money), I dusted the shoes on display, helped take inventory, and polished the Brannock Device, a metal clamp-like contraption for measuring feet—both width and length. I also ran errands. The errands were the only freedom I had, but it was always the same trip—picking up a pair of shoes, sometimes two, from a warehouse in Boston, near South Station, on Atlantic Avenue. My father sent me there one summer afternoon, and, before I left, he raised his hand and said, “No Eddie,” meaning, “Don’t associate with Eddie Springer,” a friend whom he considered a bad influence. What I liked about Eddie was the way he himself said, “I’m a wicked-bad influence.” I took the electric car to Sullivan Square, climbed the stairs, and waited on the platform in front of “Spitting Is Forbidden,” then rode the train to South Station and gave the shoe size and style to the man at the warehouse counter. He didn’t greet me or even comment. He made out an invoice by hand, measured a length of string, and tied the box while I leaned on the counter. A woman at a desk behind him smiled at me and said, “You look just like your father.” I didn’t know what to say. My father was more than fifty years old. She looked quite a bit younger. I could smell her perfume, like strong soap, and I imagined that her blond hair, too, had a fragrance. Seated, she seemed small, doll-like, but sure of herself. The man said, “Ask your father why he only buys one pair at a time.” The woman winked at me. She said, “His father only sells one pair at a time.” “And when is he going to pay me what he owes me?” “I’ll ask him.” The suggestion that my father might be tricky reassured me and made me admire him. As I left, holding the box with a clip-on handle, a wooden cylinder with wire hooked through it, the woman said, “Don’t listen to Grumpy. Your father’s a great guy. Tell him Vie was asking for him. Violet.” Maybe that was his other side—a ladies’ man, a man of the world now down on his luck as a widower and the father of a sulky teen-ager. If that was the case, it only made him more suspicious. He knew what a boy was capable of. He was puritanical and hated any kind of foolery—loud music or talk about girls, or sunny, frivolous places, like California or Florida, any sort of indiscipline. But that woman, Vie, knew something about my father that I didn’t, and the idea that he was concealing a part of his life made me dawdle on the errand, in my own concealment. “Who’s coping with his fear of the vacuum? Are you coping with your fear of the vacuum? Are you? Yes, you are!”Buy the print » I cut through South Station and bought a jelly doughnut. The woman at the counter, in a white apron and cap, lifted the doughnut from the tray with tongs and dropped it into a small bag. “Ten cents,” she said, and I gave her the dime. As I stepped away, a man with a mean face leaned over and said, “Give me that.” He looked like a gargoyle, and his smell and his ugliness made him seem violent. Handing over the bag, I held on to the shoebox and hurried out of the station as though I’d done something wrong. I went up Federal Street, walking fast, until I got to Milk Street. I had a sense that the man might be following me. I went down into Goodspeed’s bookstore. The old woman at the desk said, “You can’t bring any parcels in here.” Near the corner of Milk and Washington, I stopped at a shop that sold knives and cameras. I knew the place. There was always someone, usually two or three men, looking at the window display of knives—hunting knives with wide blades or jagged blades and shiny bone handles, bowie knives, Buck knives, Swiss Army knives. The cameras were set out in the adjoining window. A grinning man in a long coat and glasses said, “Hey, look at that camera, how small it is. That one down there.” Like a toy, a tiny camera was propped on a box with a tiny red roll of film. “You could get some swell pictures with that. Fit it in the palm of your hand,” the man said. “Take it anywhere.” I said, “I guess so. It’s really small. Maybe German.” He put his face near mine, as the man in South Station had done, demanding my doughnut. “I took some pictures of my roommate when he was bollocky,” the man said. He was smiling horribly and making a face, and he dislodged his glasses. He pushed them back into place with a dirty thumb. But I was backing away. I said, “That’s O.K.” “I could take a picture of you bollocky,” he said. “Wanna let me?” “No, thanks.” “You’re probably too shy.” “No. It’s not that. I just don’t want to.” I walked quickly into the sidewalk crowd and ducked past Raymond’s department store. I crossed Washington Street and headed up Bromfield, lingering in front of Little Jack Horner’s Jokes and Magic, then to Tremont, up Park to the black soldiers’ memorial and Hooker’s statue, and down Beacon. Just as I approached Scollay Square, five black boys, big and small, came toward me, filling the sidewalk. My heart was beating fast as I hurried through traffic to the other side of the street, and I kept walking until I got to the Old Howard theatre. Ever since leaving the shoe warehouse I’d been escaping, and it seemed strange that, trying to avoid trouble, I’d found myself here. I had come here with Eddie Springer one Saturday six months before, after bumping into him on another errand. Eddie knew the corners of Boston and all the shortcuts. It was Eddie who had shown me the knife shop and Raymond’s and the joke shop; my father had shown me the memorial to the black regiment and Hooker’s statue and the Union Oyster House. Between my father and Eddie, Boston held no secrets for me. It was all exteriors, though. I never went inside anywhere. What would be the point? I had no money, and I was afraid of being confronted. But Eddie had been to all the stores, and had even gone inside the Old Howard for a burlesque show and told me the jokes. A stripper said to a heckler, “Meet me in my dressing room. If I’m late, start without me,” which made Eddie laugh so hard he didn’t notice that I hadn’t understood. We had come this way in the winter, the same route, from South Station toward the Common, then via Scollay Square—a detour—and along Cambridge Street to the back slope of Beacon Hill. When I realized that I was retracing that winter walk with Eddie, I felt safer. I knew that I could make my way onward to North Station and to the electric cars in Sullivan Square to take the shoes back to my father. Eddie was three years older than me, a neighbor who was kind to me because he knew that my mother was dead. He smoked, he drank beer, and he knew Boston, which was like knowing the world. His confidence made him a hero to me. And he had a girlfriend—Paige. We’d gone to see her. That day with Eddie, there had been snow on the ground. Now it was a summer afternoon of hot sidewalks and sharp smells and strangers, the air of the city thick with humidity under a heavy gray sky. It all stank pleasantly of wickedness, and if I’d known anything I would have recognized it as sensual. But I was fifteen, small for my age, soon to enter my sophomore year of high school. Away from my house I wasn’t sure who I was; I had no self, nothing to put forward, no idea that I dared express, no voice, nothing but the bravado I’d learned from Eddie, even his sayings. “Eyes like pinwheels,” he’d say. Or, “She’s easy,” as he’d said of Paige. Buy the print » I remembered Paige clearly: blond, small, with a broad, blankish face, but kindly eyes. She listened and responded with her eyes and didn’t say much. Eddie claimed she was an Indian, from Veazie, Maine, on the river, and he said she was a dancer. “You like her.” “She’s action.” Saying that, he believed he’d told me everything. Her smallness had made her seem girlish, but she was older than Eddie and much older than me, twentysomething. She seemed strong—experienced and sure of herself—but she had no airs. She had treated me as an equal and hadn’t mentioned that she was eight or ten years older. I don’t know why Eddie took me to meet her. Perhaps he wanted to introduce me to a life remote from mine and show me what a man of the world he was. When I was with him, I felt that I was learning how to be a man of the world myself. I liked the idea that Paige looked so demure and patient—solid and reassuring, petite and close to the ground, the ideal of girlhood—but deep down she was wild, her other self hidden, to be awakened only by Eddie, who described her howling when he made love to her. “She knows a few tricks,” he said. “And so do I.” Paige lived alone in a basement on the other side of Beacon Hill, not an apartment but one large room, the kitchen at the back wall, a double bed to the right, some heavily upholstered chairs near the front door. On this late-summer afternoon, crossing town, carrying my shoebox, I walked slowly downhill, looking for her door. But I didn’t want to knock—nor was I sure which door was hers, because on that side of the hill the houses were so much alike. I walked on the opposite side of the street, glancing across, and saw that some of the basement doors were open. Encouraged, I crossed over, and as I passed a house I saw Paige inside, framed by the doorway, standing at an ironing board, shaking water onto a red cloth and then running an iron over it. “Hi.” With the bright daylight behind me as I peered down, my face must have been hard to make out, because she looked uncertain, even a bit worried. She lifted the iron, holding it like a weapon. Instead of saying my name, I said, “Eddie’s friend.” Still holding the iron, she angled her body a bit to see me sideways, away from the light, and then said, “You! Come on in!,” and laughed in a gasping sort of way, as if in relief. I walked down the short flight of stairs to the basement room and sat in one of the upholstered chairs, exactly where I had sat six months ago, when I’d come with Eddie. “I hope it’s O.K. to stop by,” I said. “It’s nice to see you,” she said, and returned to her ironing—and I could tell from the smoothness of her movements that she meant what she said. She pushed the iron without effort across the red cloth, then with her free hand she deftly folded the cloth in half and ironed the fold, giving it a crease. “I just happened to be in the neighborhood,” I said. This explanation gave me pleasure, because it wasn’t quite true, yet sounded plausible, even suave. But I suspected that she didn’t believe me. She was literal-minded and truthful, in the way of someone with no small talk. She said, “There’s not much going on in this part of the world.” “I was headed to North Station.” Paige smiled, clapping her iron down. “How about a drink?” “I’m all set.” “There’s some lemonade in the fridge—help yourself,” she said, tossing her head, loosening her hair. Eddie would have known how to find the lemonade and a glass and pour himself a drink, but it was beyond me. It occurred to me that I was out of my depth. I knew that, had Paige not been ironing in the open doorway, I would not have approached her. Without a word, she went to the refrigerator and poured me a glass of lemonade. To fill the silence, I said, “I haven’t seen Eddie lately.” She bowed her head and went on ironing. “He changed schools. I guess he wasn’t too happy in Maine.” She still said nothing. “I’d like to go there sometime.” She nodded. “Like Eddie says, cold in the winter, and the summer’s only a few days in July.” She worked the red cloth into a tighter square and pressed it with the heel of her hand before applying the iron again. “And I don’t belong there. My mother once said, ‘Just because a cat has kittens inside an oven doesn’t make them biscuits.’ ” She didn’t react. I now felt sure that I’d raised the wrong subject. I said, “But my mother’s dead.” This roused her. She looked pained. She said, “I’m really sorry. Please have some more lemonade?” I showed her that my glass was half full. I said, “How’s the dancing?” “It’s O.K.,” she said, and, echoing the tone I’d used, “The dancing.” “Whereabouts do you do it?” “You know the High Bar?” “Not sure.” “You’ve got to be twenty-one,” she said, frowning. “It’s kind of a rough place.” “I’d like to see you there.” “No, you wouldn’t,” she said. “You’re better off somewhere else. Like getting a good education.” “No, this is correct—you’re both in 28-B. We no longer offer individual seats.”Buy the print » That was friendly. It encouraged me, because I felt that she was becoming familiar with me, and something more might happen, and it excited me, because I didn’t know what. She was a steady presence, standing with her legs apart in her loose shorts, one hand smoothing and folding the red cloth, which grew smaller with each fold, the heavy iron in her other hand. Wisps of hair framed her damp face. I was not used to seeing a woman dressed like this, almost undressed, in her own house, and that excited me, too. “So where did you learn to dance?” I asked. She smiled again, shook her head. “It’s pretty easy,” she said. “The guys don’t come there for the dancing.” As we talked, my eyes were drawn to her bed, which was neatly made, with plump pillows and a Teddy bear propped up against them, and on the side table a book. I could easily read the gold lettering on the spine, because it was a title I knew, the New Testament. That confused me. It didn’t fit with the image that Eddie had given me. She’s action. I saw us in the bed, doing—what? I’d never been in bed with a woman. “Darn,” she said. The spell broke briefly, but the way she put down the iron and fussed, hiking up her untucked blouse, made her seem sexy again. “I’m out of starch.” As she spoke, a shadow moved across her face, filling the doorway. “Just thought I’d stop in.” The slow way the man descended the stairs emphasized his bulk, as though he were climbing down a ladder, testing each step before taking another. But when he got to the bottom and I stood—my nervousness making me self-consciously polite—I saw that he was not much taller than I was, though twice as heavy. “Vic.” He went over and chucked Paige under the chin. She jerked her face away as if she expected to be slapped. “You behaving yourself?” “Have a coffee.” “I’ll have what he’s having.” “Lemonade,” Paige said. “It’s in the fridge. I have to get some starch. I’ll be right back.” “I should go,” I said. “I won’t be a minute.” “Don’t go,” Vic said at the refrigerator, pouring himself a glass of lemonade. Then Paige was out the door and up the stairs. I sat down. Vic sat in the chair next to me, but only sighed, didn’t say anything. A sound came from my throat, a worried noise, a whicker of anxiety—Heh-heh. “Heh-heh,” Vic said, the exact sound, and he stared at me. His face was hard and misshapen, with full lips. He was hunched forward in the chair, which made him look fatter, and I could hear his breathing, like gas escaping. He said, “I know who you are. You’re Eddie.” “No. I’m not Eddie.” My voice was high and terrified, and the way I said it seemed to convince him that I was lying. To calm myself, or maybe to show him that I was calm, I raised my glass to my mouth. As I began to drink, he leaned over and punched me in the side of my face, cracking the rim of the glass against my teeth and jarring my head. I drunkenly set the glass on a side table and moved unsteadily toward the stairs, just as Paige came down. “I have to go.” “What did you do?” she said angrily to Vic, but she knew. “You heard him. He has to go.” I hurried away, blind, stumbling downhill. I was so stunned at being hit in the face that I couldn’t think. My head was ringing, my jaw hurt, and yet I felt glad to be away, and happy when I saw that I wasn’t being chased. My mouth was full of foul-tasting saliva, but I didn’t spit until I got to the bottom of the hill, and then I bent over and spat blood. There was a tenderness on my tongue where my teeth, or the glass, had hit it when he punched me. Passing a pizza parlor, I caught my reflection in the window and was surprised to see that I looked normal: no one would have guessed that I’d been hit in the face. But I seemed so young, so pale, with spiky hair and a rumpled shirt. That was how I looked. Inside, I was sick, and the wound in my mouth, the taste of blood, made me afraid. I ran, skinny and breathless, to North Station, pushed my token into the slot, and hurried onto the train. It was at Sullivan Square, as the train drew in, that I remembered the shoes. I’d left them at Paige’s apartment when I ran. On the electric car I tried to think of an excuse. The truth was awful, impossible, unrepeatable. As soon as my father saw me entering the store, he said, “Shoes?,” in his economical way, not wasting words on me. But it struck me that he was his other self, too, the one the woman had described, the good guy. It seemed, as I thought this, that he was summing me up, too. “I lost them. I was on the train and looked down and they weren’t there.” “What else?”—meaning, “And what other things happened to you?” “Nothing.” He lifted my chin. The wound in my mouth hurt as he tugged my head. He leaned over and, sniffing my hair, he knew everything.

I spotted a golden feather on the edge of the concrete platform, waiting for me, while I was waiting for the train. I thought of a joke, about rats devouring an entire golden pigeon—but there was no one around to share the joke with. A bum slept expertly on a too small bench, a woman pulled herself inward and stood far away, watching her toes, and a very young man gave me a very rough look. I picked up the feather, which was on a thin gold chain, but I stayed squatted, close to the edge, leaning my head into the danger zone. I could see all the way to the next station, where the train idled, its headlights like tiger eyes in the tunnel-jungle. I waited there, poised, fascinated, as the train approached and the eyes widened. When I finally stood, the woman and the young man were staring baldly. We were all connected, all relieved that I had not jumped. I dangled my feather for them on its chain, as if to explain myself—all of this in just a blink of a moment—then the train roared its arrival, doors opened, and we stepped into separate cars. It was late, past midnight, and I was headed uptown to clean for a man. He lived in the penthouse suite of a building overlooking Central Park. There was a doorman whom I had to tell my name and the name of the man I was there to see. I used a made-up name for myself, Salvatore. The doorman introduced himself as Freddy and gave me a wink. He was a light-skinned black man, likely in his fifties. “You Latin?” “Puerto Rican,” I said, pushing my hands into my back pockets and puffing out my chest. “Yeah,” Freddy said, grinning. “Course you are.” On my way to the elevator, Freddy called me back. I stood before him and Freddy made a motion to suggest that I come even closer, as what he had to say was only for me to hear, though we were alone in the lobby. “You line up all the skinny little brown boys I seen pass through this door, headed exactly where you’re headed”—Freddy leaned toward me—“you line them up and you know what you’d have?” I waited. “What do you think you’d have?” I let my gaze crawl down to Freddy’s crotch, over his little desk, his crumpled sports-car magazine, then slowly back up to his creased face, his smug, mischievous eyes. I looked at him patiently and deliberately. “You’d have the army of a Third World country,” Freddy said, and broke into squawks of laughter. When I got to the apartment, the man instructed me to keep my underwear on. The apartment was open and very modern—sixteen-foot ceilings and one wall somehow made entirely of glass. I moved along the window-wall, polishing with ammonia and newspaper. I liked my reflection in the nighttime glass, the way my body was almost translucent, its outline and features only hinted at, and the way the city lights and the black-green hole of the Park were contained within, and spilling out of, me. The reflection of my white cotton underwear neared opacity, realness, and the gold chain with the gold feather glimmered. The man passed comment on all the usual parts of my body, but the unusual as well—my calves, the notch at the top of my spine. To comment is not necessarily to compliment, we were both aware. I did not look at him. I looked at me in the window: half disappeared, slim, and young. If you don’t pretend at vanity, the men feel dissatisfied. Look at my smooth skin, look at my young face, look at my golden feather! And then something else, conviction, took over; I am a very good pretender. So, more than anything, I want to say this: in that moment I was happy. 2. “Explain, explain,” Nigel demanded, but he did not want me to explain anything. I had become a monster to him, and he needed me to stay a monster. I kept silent, slowly spinning a sugar packet on the table with the tip of my finger. The waitress gave us a wide berth—Nigel was weeping openly—but I wished she would come and refill my empty cup. I listened to Nigel; I watched him cry; I rummaged around inside myself and tried to find a memory, a hurt, that would enable me to cry as well. I’d been a dick, dicked around, throughout the long near-decade of our relationship, countless men, often, though not always, for money. In penance, I wanted to cry for him now. I rummaged and rummaged, but I was dry. “Explain!” Nigel demanded. He smacked the table. A grown man, blubbering like he was, and that pink thrift-store oxford with the elbows patched, and his foppish hair—we looked very gay, and a little pathetic. I could perceive us through the eyes of the round family in the neighboring booth; I could hear the thoughts of the single men, eating alone at the counter, their hunched slabs of backs to us; and the waitress, of course—I had her number—was never going to bring that pot of coffee around again. We looked ridiculous, and Nigel looked especially ridiculous. I should have been able to shut off that judgment, that concern for appearances. I should have focussed on Nigel, only Nigel, and felt something. “Come on,” I said. I slipped twenty dollars out of my pocket and made sure to catch the waitress’s eye as I laid it near the edge of the table—twenty dollars for two cups of coffee and being gay in an all-night working-class diner in South Brooklyn. “Explain, explain,” Nigel whined. I stood and lifted his ratty old peacoat from the peg. “Put this on. Wipe your eyes. We’re leaving. Here—napkin. Blow your nose.” I handed Nigel his scarf, which he had knitted himself, poorly. How proud he was of its garish colors and its holes and dropped stitches, the inelegance of it all. I had watched him from bed, many nights, knitting in the lamplight and playing records with our little fat, deaf cat on his lap, and I had thought him beautiful, soft, cozy; at the same time, there was the dust and the clutter and the cat hair, and always the same records, scratched in the same places, and I would ponder what made him so soft, and what he was so afraid of. “Explain. I need you to explain, you asshole.” “Get up. Come on. Enough. I’ll walk you home.” There was such a wind, such an icy wind wriggling into every buttonhole, and I had no hat. I was glad for the wind; everyone walked face down, the crowns of their heads fully forward, hands tucked into armpits. No one looked at anyone else, or had to be looked at. But I let that wind push and bite into my face, and I looked at the men—even then, I looked at all the men. Our shabby little apartment was now his. He did not want to let me up, but I told him it was too cold to try to explain anything out on the sidewalk. “Is that a joke? Is this a trick?” Nigel asked. “Trickster, trickster. Am I a trick?” He pushed the key into first one lock, then the next. He trembled. I did not want to have sex with him, but I knew that he needed me to want to. Inside, the cat pushed against our legs. “She missed you,” Nigel said. I thought to pick her up, but I was wearing a long black wool coat and our cat was very white. I took Nigel’s hand and led him toward the bedroom. “No,” he said. “Not anywhere it ever was. Here.” He opened up the bathroom door and pulled the light bulb’s chain. “On the floor.” I needed only to glance at the hexagons of white tile to feel a deep, hard coldness in my bones, yet I stripped, dutiful, diligent, and laid my bare back against the floor, and waited. Nigel came back with a condom; we had never used one, not once. “Where the hell did you get that?” “Shut up.” “No, seriously, did you buy that? Already? Already you bought that?” “Put it on.” “I always ask for a pony for my birthday. I find it gives the most bargaining room.”Buy the print » I did. We proceeded. Underneath me, the floor grew somehow colder and harder. As we gathered speed, Nigel put his hands on my shoulders and lifted me, I thought, for a kiss—we had not yet kissed—but instead he slammed my shoulders back down, and my skull met the floor in a blinding, white-noise kind of way. It took a few moments to realize that I was curled on my side, cradling my head, eyes closed. I opened my eyes; Nigel was standing in the bedroom doorway, watching me. He looked unwell—shell-shocked, naked, clutching our cat to his chest. He looked very, very unwell. “I’m O.K.,” I said. He sneered, huffed a crazy laugh, and kicked the door shut. 1. I locked the doors to the bookstore and cut the music but left the lights on—the whole store suddenly hugely silent, the shelves picked over, in need of straightening. I turned the chairs upside down on the café tables and left the empty register drawer hanging open to discourage the curious from putting a brick through the window. In the back, I counted out the till. Once, I stole a hundred dollars in ones and fives, and how flushed Nigel was when I kept pulling bills out of my pockets, how exasperated. How many jobs had I been fired from, or walked out on, over the years, how many long stretches of joblessness? I felt free. Always I’d felt free; Nigel had never been fired, never quit abruptly. He worked slavishly for social-justice organizations, kept us in food, and cat food, and secondhand records. People steal, I told him. People lie, people cheat. Except that he didn’t steal, lie, or cheat. I was in the back, counting out the till, and the phone rang. I thought it was him, I was expecting him, any minute, he was the one supposed to come and meet me after work, but it was Nigel calling, from just outside. “Poke your head out,” he said. “You’ll see me.” “I’m counting.” “Take a break from counting—sheesh—poke your head out, let me see you.” “I’ll lose my place. Anyway, go home, I told you I had plans.” “Plans? Go home?” “I told you—Caroline. And she just wants me, not us. You know how she gets—she’ll want to get drunk and unload, and you have to work in the morning. And anyway she just wants me, not us. It’s not personal, she just feels superior to me, thinks I’m more fucked up than she is, so she can tell me—” “There’s a man,” Nigel said, “on a bicycle.” And I just shut up. “There’s a man, looking in the window. He’s sitting on a bicycle, looking in the window. And I want you to tell me the truth. Is he waiting for you?” “Baby.” “Unbelievable,” Nigel whispered. And he whispered something else, some other word. Or it was the wind. Then he said, “He looks like a really nice guy. You unbelievable asshole.” He was not a nice guy, but he knew how to look like one. We stayed on the phone. I stayed in the back. Nigel walked toward the train. The man on the bicycle waited. I pleaded and apologized and pretended I did not want to break up as much as I really did want to break up. All the while, I felt such anger; I was so tired of apologizing. Nigel was always finding discarded plants and taking them home to regenerate. Everywhere in our apartment were plants, thriving. This, too, infuriated me—and when Nigel instructed me not to come home that night, when he told me to come by the next day, while he was at work, and remove all my shit and never come home again, I thought of those plants, of a space in the world without them. “It’s over,” Nigel said. “You’re free.” 0. Nigel and I took jobs as farmhands on a tiny two-acre farm in Virginia—a sloppy, rocky field nestled in the folds of the Blue Ridge Mountains. We drove down non-stop, taking turns behind the wheel. The car was Nigel’s, some old thing he’d scrimped for. We’d slowly chug up one side of a mountain, then slide down the other, recklessly, not braking for as long as possible, hollering at our luck, at our newfound right to do as we damn well pleased and to do it together. We were nineteen years old, both of us, and we’d found each other. At our first truck stop, I stole a pair of driving glasses that had yellow-tinted lenses and large black plastic frames. They made the whole world seem as if I were swimming through honey. Nigel started on some sensible nonsense about the serious consequences I was gambling with. He speculated about the jails around those parts, the conditions, the prejudice and hostilities of others, but I slipped the glasses on him while he was driving, I kissed him on the neck, I said, “Look.” And he said, “Wow, it’s beautiful.” We arrived at night, on the heels of a rainstorm that had sucked away half of the dirt road that led to the farmer’s driveway. We kept sinking into little craters filled with water that splashed up onto the windshield, as if we were driving through a car wash. It took three passes before we found the turnoff, an unmarked path of red dirt, two parallel paths, really, tire tracks, with grass growing in the middle. Leaves and brambles closed in from both sides and scraped against the windows. Three miles on this path, with no light beyond the scope of our high beams, no moonlight, no starlight, just trees and a blackness so heavy that we both stopped talking and stretched our necks until our foreheads were almost touching the windshield, trying to make sense of the tarry vastness around us. “We just slipped off the edge of the world,” Nigel said. The headlights caught a flash of sparkling eyes, some tiny faceless beast. Inside the car, the green light of the dashboard reflected off the soft white underside of Nigel’s chin. It looked as if the light were radiating from inside him, as if he had swallowed a fistful of emeralds. “What are you so afraid of?” I asked. Nigel took his eyes from the drive for just a second to look at me. “Oh, come on. You love to pretend you’re so fearless.” The farmer appeared on the edge of the path, shielding his eyes, a shotgun in his hands. Nigel stopped the car and cranked down his window. “You’ll have to leave the car here,” the farmer said. He made no excuse for the gun. “You brought a flashlight?” He led us to a small shack, a tilting shingled structure with four walls and a wood-burning stove. It was perched on the slope of a minor mountain, about a third of the way up, with thick slabs of rock stuck under the front side, a new rock every year, to keep the house from tumbling forward into the fields of wild raspberries. He explained this to us with wide sweeps of the flashlight. We had met the farmer that spring, when he had opened up his land to the swarms of protesters descending on the capital for a week of anger and messy celebration. We’d missed an entire day of protests, because we were so taken with the seedlings and the greenhouse and the mountain and the old hippie back-to-the-lander who told us charming, paranoid stories and invited us to work for him in the summer, when he could use the extra hands. Now, in the darkness, on the side of the mountain, the man seemed ornery and off. “She’s wobbly,” the farmer said. “She’s aiming to pitch, but she’ll make it through the summer.” “You’re sure about that,” Nigel said, too timid to curve the statement into a question. I was breathless from the hike and the weight of our belongings, trying to keep my panting quiet. “No stars,” the farmer replied. “The storm. Usually there’s stars. Good night.” I can’t open the door to that shack, can’t describe the night we spent, the way we spent it, or that first wet morning; I can’t get to all the blooming, opening, buds, flowers, fruit; I can’t tell about the hives, the honey, the chicks that arrived in the mail, the summer lightning, our browning skin, the view from the mountaintop, the tumble down the mountainside, the words I had never known—zinnia, rototiller, the word for calling the pigs to come and eat our slop—the skin of the pigs, the skin of my man, how he became my man, the promise and the pretending, the retelling of entire plots of movies in the absence of electricity; nor can I get to the dirty white feral kitten, that scraggly runt of the barn litter, and the farmer’s snicker that Nigel’d done a thing as senseless as adopt her, ruined her by feeding her. I can’t open the door to that shack. No, we’re on the slope of a minor mountain, in the dark, wondering what in hell we’ve signed ourselves up for, and how’s it all going to play.

I’m having dinner at the Whole Foods on Center Boulevard with my mother, who is dying. My poor mother, whom I’m trying not to sob over, is sitting across from me in the booth, transfixed by her cardboard plate, eating, with a strange and elegant enthusiasm, broccoli cake and something or other, as if any of this mattered. She’s still a young woman, which is half the tragedy, and she had me too young, which is the other half of the tragedy, but she remains beautiful, even close to death, with her hair mostly blond and her face almost flawless. If a stranger were to walk past our table he might mistake us for an attractive couple on a date; her beauty is a vexing and unresolved public issue for me. Now I sit in fear that at any moment the plastic fork will snap off between her teeth. How she has maintained an appetite I have no idea. She’s always been a nibbler because her figure has always been paramount, long legs and a narrow waist—even during her years of celibacy—but in the wake of the dire and unexpected news her hunger has become voracious. Perhaps it was just lying in wait. Meanwhile, the brown rice and assorted greens on my cardboard plate have grown cold. No matter, I’ll eat later at the all-night diner near my house which serves whatever the opposite of brown rice and assorted greens is. My own sustenance is the least of my concerns at present. Everything is the least of my concerns at present. Everything except the ticking of the clock that has begun its final countdown. In contrast to the short time that remains for my mother stands the long time that remains for me. This long time includes everything that I must do during and after her short time. Dying is arduous and taxing. Only the dead rest in peace. Audio: Saïd Sayrafiezadeh reads. I’d taken the afternoon off from work so that I could accompany my mother to her doctor’s appointment, which, given all available evidence, was supposed to be a mere formality. We had even laughed about it. “Test results, ha-ha.” Now all bets were off. “The next few months are going to be the most challenging,” the doctor had told us. He made it sound as if he were delivering moderately good news, as if there were less challenging months to come, and if we could only get through these “next few months” it would be smooth sailing after that. What he really meant was that at some point soon my mother would be dead and the challenge would be over. That was the silver lining. That was what my mother and I had to look forward to. Twenty years ago, we wouldn’t have been eating at a Whole Foods on Center Boulevard. Twenty years ago, commuters driving in from the suburbs gave the street a wide berth on their way downtown, even if it added fifteen, twenty, thirty minutes to their trip. They referred to this as “Doing the loop,” and it turned into a joke, and then it turned into a song by a local rock band that became popular on the radio station. The only reason to come to Center Boulevard back then was if you were the type of person who needed to shop at Goodwill. My mother and I happened to be that type of person. Six days in the city and we had no dishes. So we set out one morning, naïve and holding hands, and when we finally came around the corner, forty-five minutes later, we were greeted by a long and unlucky road, running all the way to the horizon, bounded on both sides by burned-out buildings and exhibiting no signs of life. There wasn’t even a parked car. The emptiness was overwhelming, and so was the silence—we could hear our own footsteps on the pavement. If my mother was nervous she didn’t show it; even her hand in mine remained perspiration-free. Way off in the distance was the big blue Goodwill sign beckoning us with its half a smiling face. “Ooh, there it is!” my mother said, as if we were in the culminating stages of a treasure hunt. Midway to our destination a man came darting out from between two buildings. He was shirtless, even though it was late fall, and he stood in our path staring at us, saying nothing, breathing hard. After a few moments of panting, he gave my mother a wink, a gesture I didn’t completely understand, and then he disappeared back where he’d come from. It happened so quickly that it was hard to know if it had happened at all. My mother said sympathetically, “Looks like that man could use a shirt from Goodwill,” but it felt as if she were talking about something we’d seen in a movie a long time ago. We ended up spending the entire afternoon browsing the dregs, before purchasing two pots and a chipped dining set for three that smelled of mothballs. There was no three,of course, but it was smart to be prepared for all eventualities. And since I’d been “such a good boy today,” my mother bought me, as a token of her appreciation, a football jersey of the local team. It had yellow stripes and blue stars and a stain on the sleeve. I was eight years old and didn’t know anything about football. “It fits you perfectly,” she said, and it did. On the back was a strange, unpronounceable name in large white letters. I had become someone named Kruszewski. I felt like a clown. “You’ll learn all about it soon enough,” she said. She was trying to be upbeat, and I didn’t want to disappoint her. She wanted to spin this move to a new city as just one in a series of adventures, when in fact it was a last-gasp attempt at finding our own good will. But she was right: the football jersey somehow made me an instant star among my classmates. Kruszewski happened to be the best player on the league’s worst team, and, merely by wearing the shirt, I was closely associated with him. I even managed to affect a tone of authority when discussing the previous week’s game, which I hadn’t seen and wouldn’t have understood if I had. All I had to do was let others narrate while I reënacted the highlights by falling on the floor and rolling around with general fervor. Eventually, I learned the rules and became a fan, and for a while a rumor went around class, precipitated mostly by my mysterious arrival in the middle of the school year, that I might actually be Kruszewski’s son. I did nothing either to encourage or to dispel this rumor. It was tantalizing for everyone, including me, to think that I might actually be the child of a star. “I’m not saying yes,” I would say with world-weariness, “and I’m not saying no.” No, I was the son of an engineering professor who was bald and smoked a pipe, whose only foray into physical exertion was the summer of his sophomore year of college, when he washed dishes in the campus cafeteria. He confided in me once, wistfully, while extolling the virtues of manual labor, that he “had even begun to develop some muscles that summer.” I understood this to be mainly a cautionary tale, no doubt because those muscles had subsequently been lost, never to be rediscovered, and because, perhaps as compensation, he spent the greater part of my childhood holed up in his bachelor pad making love to a succession of engineering students, plying them with sweet nothings about their scientific genius. That was what he had plied my mother with until he got her pregnant. The party was over for him after that, or at least it was on hiatus for the next five years, until he could figure out a way to extricate himself from her. Her meaning my mother. After the cleaving, he made sure to send money. The money was in lieu of visiting me. “I’m sure you can appreciate how overwhelmed I am with committee work,” he scribbled on official letterhead, which my mother saved in a shoebox. The checks came frequently at first, then haphazardly, then hardly at all. “I’m sure you can appreciate the limitations of a professor’s salary.” My mother found a job at the neighborhood library, “a way station,” she called it, all the while dreaming of one day becoming an engineer and designing roller coasters. On the weekends, she’d clear off the kitchen table and unfurl dusty blueprints from her college days. They were all numbers and arrows, and I couldn’t see any evidence of an actual roller coaster. “Where’s the fun?” I asked. “The fun is coming,” she said. Now Kruszewski is long retired and there’s a Whole Foods on Center Boulevard and my mother is dying. Across from the Whole Foods is Starbucks. Next to Starbucks is Penelope’s Boutique. Next to the boutique is another boutique, and so on, for the length of the boulevard, the sequence interrupted only by the Goodwill, the sole remaining evidence of the age when this boulevard was a wasteland inhabited by shirtless phantasms. The blue sign still beckons with its smiling half-face that looks as if it had been drawn by a child with a crayon, but now it beckons the hip, who go there to discover cheap vintage clothes that a poor person would never dare wear. The Goodwill will outlast Whole Foods; I’m sure of it. It’ll outlast Starbucks, too. When the boulevard crumbles and reverts to its genuine self, Goodwill will be the last man standing. That’s the cycle. My mother pauses long enough in eating her broccoli cake to take an extended drink of water from a plastic cup. Her head goes back and her throat contracts gracefully. “Mmm,” she says with appreciation, as if she’d just come in from a hot day in the fields. Perhaps when your days are numbered your senses become heightened and you begin to experience everything with newfound intensity. After all, how many more drinks of water are left for her? How many more meals at Whole Foods? The march toward finiteness has begun. She wipes her mouth with her napkin, leaving one lone crumb on her chin, and I want to say, politely, Mom, maybe you should, you know, wipe your face again, because she has always been mortified by even one piece of lint on her dress. When I was a child, she would screech and recoil anytime my finger approached the vicinity of my nose. But more pressing issues have usurped the lifelong primacy of good manners. Good manners, good graces, good looks have become things of the past. We’ve arrived at that realm where the physical body has decreed an entirely new set of rules of acceptability. “If you don’t stop saying ‘This whole game is a charade!’ we’re going home.”Buy the print » “Do you want something else?” I ask. There’s a plaintive tone to my voice. She looks at me and smiles. She licks her red lips. I wonder if her lips are drying out, and if this is an indication of the disease working its way toward the surface. Her demeanor betrays nothing of the verdict we’re contending with. I feel traumatized, as if I’d just walked away from a plane crash, but her legs are crossed and her posture’s perfect. Her earrings catch the fluorescent light. “Yes,” she says, “there is something else I want.” Emphasis on “else,” emphasis on “want.” She leans toward me. She smells faintly of perfume. I can tell she’s thinking not in the narrow sense of wanting something else tonight, like broccoli cake, but in the terrifying existential sense of wanting something else from life. For most of my childhood there was always something more we wanted, something more we were just about to get, something that was going to turn our situation around once and for all. It was vague and indefinable, this thing, hovering nearby in the air. I had relied on my mother to get us that thing, but there was only so much she could do, and now we have only three months left to do it. But no, I’m wrong, she just wants more broccoli cake. That night, in order to pass some of our precious time, we play a game of Scrabble, sitting by the wood-burning fireplace that my mother restored at great expense after I finished college and moved out. It’s August and it’s hot and there’s no reason to start a fire, but it seems fitting somehow that we spend our last days together enjoying the warmth of a fireplace that sat vacant and defunct throughout my childhood. This portal into the world was the stuff of troubling dreams for me. How could we be so certain that someone or something wouldn’t descend into our home in the middle of the night? “Don’t be ridiculous,” my mother had told me, misunderstanding my concern. “Santa Claus is a myth.” I can see myself looking back at this game of Scrabble years from now, looking back at myself looking back, Mom and I, sitting on the rug as the flames licked, the wood cracked, the heat emanated. It’s the type of memory one should make an effort to create if one has the opportunity. In a few short months I will be selling this house, including the fireplace, which, I suppose, has added some value to what is, at best, a modest two-bedroom, two-story home with some original fixtures in a mildly decent neighborhood. But now is not the time to think of things like real estate. Now is the time to think of moments. Our moments together in this house. The rug I sit on, the Samsung television I used to watch, the couch in the corner, all the familiar objects from the past—these I will sell on Craigslist. “Maybe I should start a fire,” I say, as if the thought had just flitted through my mind. And to my surprise my mother agrees, perhaps discerning that we have entered the territory of the profound. “O.K.,” she says, “that sounds like a nice idea.” Nice idea, indeed. Except I can’t quite remember how to get a fire going. I can’t remember, because I never learned. I fumble with the logs and the lighter fluid and the bellows. The flame catches but does not hold. It dwindles to nothing. My mother has to come and help, and now the two of us are struggling side by side. “Like this,” she tells me with frustration, because she is, if nothing else, an impatient person in the face of what she deems foolishness. She could never tolerate grammatical errors on my homework or in my speech. She could not tolerate laziness or idiocy in me or in others. “You won’t believe what So-and-So did today!” she’d say, regaling me with stories of her incompetent co-workers. Maybe she sensed that her own incompetence was lurking somewhere beneath the surface. Then suddenly, out of an unforgiving slab of wood, a flame comes to life, soft and yellow, just barely hanging on. Even from this small flame I can feel a significant amount of heat radiating, and I have an inkling that this nice idea of mine is actually a ridiculous idea, and that in a few minutes the living room will be sweltering, suffocating its occupants. “How lovely,” my mother says. The Scrabble game is the same one we used when I was a child. It’s missing one of the “f”s and the board is so worn that it has almost come apart. We’d played on rainy days. “Dog,” “cat,” that type of thing. She was always encouraging and pedagogic. “What a good verb,” she would say. She would assist me at the end of the game, that desperate, gruelling time when one has only a few letters remaining, the majority of them vowels, and the board is already so crowded that there is no place to spell even the word “it.” There was a humiliating quality to that endgame, having to have her come lean over and help, her breath on my neck. “Show Mommy your letters.” I was a little boy being instructed in the immutable fact of my own helplessness. Here, then, was my first lesson. “Look!” she would say. “ ‘Rat’ —‘rate’!” It was a form of alchemy, this ability to dislodge hidden words. “Look: ‘at’—‘eat’!” She was too eager in her discoveries. Her eagerness compounded my powerlessness. When I looked down at the board to try to fend for myself, I could find nothing, anywhere. My mother’s delight in wordplay infuriated me, and on one occasion I slammed my fist into the middle of the board, upsetting two hours’ worth of spelling. Now it is my mother who, on her first three turns, is spelling things like “at” and “or,” saying tsk-tsk to herself, garnering three points per turn, shrugging as if it were all just the luck of the draw, as if the game only ever came down to whatever random letters you happened to choose. The letters are the letters, her tsk-tsk implies, and there is nothing more you or anyone else could have done differently. Her inability to spell is troubling, and I worry that it is in fact a result of the illness worming its way into her brain, overtaking the part of the mind which processes vocabulary. I have a desire to rush to her side and show her what she could have spelled for fourteen points. “Look, Mom, here: ‘mouse’!” This would be something I would look back on and see as our lives having come full circle. Or perhaps my mother just doesn’t care about spelling anymore. Why struggle, she has decided, why labor, why churn when there are only a few weeks to go? This competitiveness has always been so silly. Let’s just spell “be” and move on with it so we can sit here enjoying each other’s company in front of the fireplace. But I can’t move on. I have resolved to produce something brilliant with what I’ve been given: aamasjp. I will not be dissuaded from this cause. My unconscious, ever more astute than my conscious, is sending a faint signal not to give up, that a seven-letter word does indeed exist somewhere within the jumble. I am determined to uncover it. I am determined to impress my mother. She will be able to witness the fruits of her labor. She will kiss me on the face. She will gush with praise for her little boy now all grown up and a successful speller. Time passes. I am aware of the time passing. I am aware that the temperature in the living room is growing close to unbearable. I’ve rolled up my sleeves. I’ve taken off my socks. Droplets of sweat have broken out on my forehead and neck. How long does it take a log to fully burn? To put the fire out now, midway, would be to accept defeat, to invite bad luck. When I glance at my mother she appears, thankfully, to be indifferent both to the heat and to how long I’m taking. She peers at her letters with curiosity. Even in the heat she’s composed, her cheeks just slightly flushed. “Whose turn is it?” she wants to know. Her voice startles me. It’s been quiet for too long. Only the fire has been making noise. I’m worried that her question is rhetorical and that she is gently prodding me to spell my word, whatever it is—“map,” “amp,” “maps”—so that we can end this childish game. “It’s my turn,” I say. My voice is even more startling than my mother’s. I need water. I need air. But I can’t stop now. I’m close, I can feel that I’m close—my unconscious is telling me that the moment of truth is drawing near, and that to stand up and open a window would be to jeopardize the balance of forces in the room, and that to compromise with “map” would be to squander a final chance at everlasting glory, and, yes, suddenly there it is, yes, in a flash, staring up at me. My mind has unlocked the mystery, it has given rhythmic order to that paralyzing randomness that has been confronting me all evening: “pajamas.” “Here you go, Mom,” I say, as modestly as I can, as if this were a favor done for her sake, my hands shaking as I lay down the seven wonderful letters that will reap me no less than eighty points. But Mom has fallen asleep, her head bent, her blond hair falling down around her face. The next day I take a trip to Ellsworth Daybreak Vista, in the valley by the old skating rink, to inquire about reserving a room for my mother. Ellsworth Daybreak Vista could be your average, worn-out apartment building if it weren’t for the two ambulances parked outside with their lights flashing. It’s impossible to tell if they’re coming or going, these ambulances, or are simply stationed there to wait for the inevitable. This is why I’ve chosen to come here without my mother—there’s no reason to subject her to the grisly details of what lies in the future. Soon she will need everything: medicine at all hours, meals in bed, bathing, wiping, toenail-clipping. Any day now the minor things are going to become major things, and when everything falls apart it’s going to fall apart fast. “Sir, have you been drinking, not drinking, drinking, not drinking, drinking?”Buy the print » The admissions coördinator greets me at the entrance. His name is Mickey Poindexter, and he’s got a gut and a nametag and he smells like cigarettes. I think that I know him from somewhere, that we may have gone to the same high school, where he may have been one of those upperclassmen lunchtime assholes. But of this I can’t be sure. In any case, he’s not an asshole anymore. “Welcome,” he says. He grasps my hand warmly. “Right this way.” He’s concerned without being maudlin; he’s comforting without being Pollyanna-ish. We all know why you’re here, buddy, is the subtext. Let’s do what we can to maintain our dignity. We ride the elevator in respectful silence to the second floor, which can be accessed only by the turn of a key on Mickey’s key chain. Entry and exit are obviously not at the discretion of the tenants. In other words, the tenants are not really tenants and this is not an apartment building. The elevator doors open onto six elderly people in wheelchairs watching a game show with their chins on their chests. An attendant sits nearby, her eyes glued to the screen, waiting for something exciting to happen. This is not the way to make a good first impression. There’s a sign on the wall listing the weekly activities: chair exercises on Monday, etc. The carpeting, as anticipated, is worn and of a purple-green pattern that belongs to a different era, as does the wood panelling. Someone, I think, has soiled himself or herself recently, because the air is heavy with Febreeze. Mickey’s office needs Febreeze, too: it reeks of cigarette smoke. This makes me wonder if he sits in here chain-smoking all day, and, if so, what other rules does he flout? Football paraphernalia covers the walls, floor to ceiling, the yellow stripes and blue stars of past teams, going so far back in time that there’s even a framed pair of socks from when the team was blue stripes and yellow stars. We break the ice by talking about the upcoming season, which happens to begin tonight, with the first, meaningless pre-season game. Mickey is full of facts and figures. I don’t know what he’s talking about. I gave up on the team years ago, because one can endure only so much defeat before it begins to feel like a manifestation of one’s own character. The last time I went to a game I was sixteen, standing outside the stadium for hours with three of my buddies, hoping to get autographs. The team had lost again, and the players, when they finally emerged from the tunnel, were gloomy. Still, they signed. Thirty years and there hadn’t been a championship. Thirty years and they hadn’t even come close. But each year was a new beginning, each year was the year it was finally going to happen. “Why not us?” was the slogan one season, plastered on billboards and the sides of buses. It was a good question with no good answer. But according to Mickey things are now lining up perfectly. Apparently, we’ve made the right trades, and we’ve signed the right free agents, we’ve cut the right washed-up players. This is our year, he says. This is supposed to be our year. He’s adamant. He’s passionate. He’s in love. I want to remind him that every year is supposed to be our year, and every year ends up being someone else’s year, but he speaks with such optimism and insight that his conviction is infectious. He may make a believer of me again, which isn’t hard, since deep down we all want to be believers. “Start watching them tonight,” he says with confidence. Meanwhile, I ooh and aah over the memorabilia he’s accumulated throughout the years. No memorabilia is too obscure. Case in point: he has a single silver cleat, the size of a tooth, that broke off from one of the players’ shoes during a game. “I bought it for three hundred and fifty dollars,” Mickey tells me proudly. It seems a fair price. Speaking of fair price, the room for my mother will cost four thousand a month, not including laundry service. I’m wondering if our rapport over football will earn me some kind of break. “Will she need her clothes laundered?” Mickey wants to know. His voice is concerned and comforting. “Yes,” I say. “Yes, she will.” That’s an additional forty-five dollars. We take the elevator to the third floor by way of Mickey’s key chain. Above the third floor is the fourth floor. Above the fourth floor is the fifth floor. The fifth floor is where tenants gowhen they lose their minds. There is no sixth floor. “This is our nicest floor,” Mickey assures me, referring to the floor we are walking on. I don’t know what makes this the nicest floor, but I’m beginning to suspect that Mickey might be the best salesman I’ve ever met. The thought makes me suspicious. It also makes me susceptible. The hallway is long and has the same purple-green carpeting as the second floor, but here it seems more vibrant—stylish, even. We turn and turn again. We pass a nurses’ station, where two nurses are standing hip to hip, as if on an assembly line, divvying up the day’s doses. Apart from the four of us, there is no indication that there are any actual living people on this floor. Hanging on the doors are signs that say things like “We love you, Grandpa,” but these feel as if they were messages written long ago. I wonder if I will make a sign for my mother’s door. I wonder if I will come and play Scrabble with her. I wonder how long her stay here will be, and I do some quick math in my head in multiples of four thousand. Room 303, our final destination, is not accessed by way of a key. The door is open and the Febreeze is evident. How long has this room been vacant, and what is the Febreeze intended to disguise? 303 seems like a number that has, or should have, some symbolic significance in my mother’s life, but I can draw no connection. Mickey stands to the side, as any good Realtor knows to do, allowing me to take in the surroundings as if I had walked in on my own. It’s a small, quiet, square room with a kitchenette and a window that faces the courtyard, where a tree is in full bloom. I make a big deal about the tree, the leaves, the branches, and this pleases Mickey, as if he had planted it himself. I hope that my mother, the librarian, will be satisfied with the tranquillity. I hope she will say that I did a good job of finding this, her final home. I hope that she will not resent me. “Here’s the walk-in closet,” Mickey says proudly. There’s no need whatsoever for a walk-in closet. My mother will come with barely enough to fill a dresser. I want to tell Mickey to seal up the walk-in closet and knock five hundred dollars off the rent. Close off the kitchenette, too. Just keep the two nurses in the nurses’ station—everything else is superfluous and ostentatious. Even the window that faces the courtyard can go. Even the tree. That evening I make a serious error in judgment and take my mother to see “Life of Pi.” In 3-D, no less. It’s playing at the Royal Cineplex at the absurd price of three dollars and fifty cents, which makes me feel as if my decision were that much more sound. “Why so cheap?” I ask the ticket-taker. “We aim to please,” he says. He’s about nineteen, and he’s showing off for my mother. When she walks past, he looks at her butt. The ticket price harks back to an earlier era, an era that predates me, an era in which my mother and father would have flourished, all uncomplicated technology, clear rules, understandable roles. I thought “Life of Pi” would reflect that era as well, simpleminded storytelling with a happy ending, but within thirty minutes there’s a young man floating alone on a boat in the ocean with wild animals trying to kill him. The metaphor is robust and immediate. We’ve got two hours to go, my mother and I, with plastic glasses stuck to our faces. Violence, desperation, desolation fill the screen. Violence is one thing, but desolation is another. And desolation in 3-D is another still. The sea, where our hero must somehow make peace with the animals, floats off the screen toward me. I feel as if I’m about to drown beneath this false water. Yet my mother appears captivated by what’s unfolding. She leans forward in her seat, elbows on her knees, lights flashing off her glasses. “Isn’t this so boring?” I ask, as if it couldn’t be anything but. My mother shrugs. She’s amenable to anything. Perhaps when you don’t have much time left equanimity sets in and you spell “or” and you leave in the middle of movies, no questions asked. We exit the way we came, tossing our half-used glasses in the cardboard box. The ticket-taker gets one last chance to check out my mother. On the way home we stop at the all-night diner by my house for a cup of coffee and “maybe a bite to eat.” There are six televisions above the counter, all tuned to the same channel: the pre-season football game. The sound is off, but the mood in the diner is pure excitement. Two dozen fools sit jabbering, staring upward, watching the silent commentators analyze and extrapolate. My mother wants broccoli cake, or some approximation of it, but the diner doesn’t sell that, of course. “We don’t got any of that, hon,” the waitress says. My mother flinches at the grammar. In lieu of broccoli cake I order her a side of steamed broccoli, a slice of red-velvet cake, and some ice cream, because why not? The lights in the diner are bright, unflatteringly so, but still my mother looks young and beautiful. She’ll always look young and beautiful. Even on her final day at Ellsworth Daybreak Vista her eyes will be blue and striking, her hair will be lush. She won’t fall apart. She’ll make sure of it. I can see the televisions from where we’re sitting, and on the first play of the game the wayward rookie, the one that everybody had been dubious about, takes the ball and races eighty yards into the end zone. “Look at that, Mom!” I say. The diner goes crazy, and my mother turns around to see what the fuss is about. And then, just a few plays later, our team scores again, and the patrons are screaming even louder, and now my mother is smiling and clapping, and so am I. And before that first quarter is over we’ve scored four more times. Everyone is standing and shouting, everyone including the waitress, including my mother, the diner full of fire and zeal, as if this lone pre-season game had any bearing on what’s to come.

First we did molly, lay on the thick carpet touching it, ourselves, one another. We did edibles, bathed dumbly in the sun, took naps on suède couches. Later, we did blow off the keys to ecologically responsible cars. We powdered glass tables and bathroom fixtures. We ate mushrooms—ate and waited, ate and waited. Then we just ate, emptied the Ziplocs into our mouths like chip bags. We smoked cigarettes and joints, sucked on lozenges lacquered in hash oil. We tried one another’s benzos and antivirals, Restoril, Avodart, YAZ, and Dexedrine, looking for contraindications. We ate well: cassoulets, steak frites, squid-ink risotto with porcini, spices from Andhra Pradesh, Kyoto, Antwerp. Of course we drank, too: pure agaves, rye whiskeys, St-Germain, old Scotch. We spent our hot December afternoons next to the custom saltwater pool or below the parasols of palm fronds, waiting, I suppose, to feel at peace, to baptize our minds in an enforced nullity, to return to a place from which we could begin again. This was a few years ago in Palm Springs, at the end of a very forgettable year. When I say that I was visiting old friends, friends from whom my life and my sense of life had diverged, I am not trying to set myself apart. Marta and Eli had lived in Los Angeles for a number of years—long enough, I suppose, that whatever logic connected immediate impulse to long-term goal to life plan to identity had slipped below conscious awareness and become simply a part of them. I was by no means innocent, either, of the slow supplanting drift by which the means to our most cherished and noble ends become the ends themselves—so that, for instance, writing something to change the world becomes writing something that matters to you becomes publishing something halfway decent becomes writing something publishable; or, to give another arbitrary example, finding everlasting love becomes finding somewhat lasting love becomes finding a reasonable mix of tolerance and lust becomes finding a sensible social teammate. And, of course, with each recalibration you think not that you are trading down or betraying your values but that you are becoming more mature. And maybe you are. In any case I was writing a book, one that I hoped would make my contemporaries see how petty and misguided their lives were, how worthwhile my sacrifices, how refreshing my repudiations, how heroic my stubbornness, etc. Eli and Marta, for their part, were trying to have a baby. They would spend the ensuing year attempting to get pregnant, and eventually they would, and later this baby, and their second baby, would grant them some reprieve from the confusion we were all afflicted by in those years. But before they had their baby, during the week when this story takes place, they had decided to do every last thing that a baby precludes, every last irresponsible thing, so as, I guess, to be able to say, Yes, I have lived, I have done the things that mean you have lived, brushed shoulders with the lurid genie Dionysus, who counsels recklessness and abandon, decadence, self-destruction, and waste. The Baby Bucket List, they were calling it. And I was game. Though I was not planning to have a child anytime soon, I thought we could all stand to chemically unfasten our fingers from their death grips on our careers and wardrobes and topiarian social lives and ne-plus-ultra vacations in tropical Asia. The words “we” and “our” are somewhat figurative here; I remain unsure whether I rounded out our group’s eclecticism or stood in contrast to it. But we were, in any case, a particular sort of modern hustler: filmmakers and writers (screen, Web, magazine), who periodically worked as narrative consultants on ad campaigns, sustainability experts, P.R. lifers, designers or design consultants, social entrepreneurs, and that strange species of human being who has invented an app. We rubbed elbows with media moguls and Hollywood actors and the lesser-known but still powerful strata that include producers and directors, and C.F.O.s, and the half-famous relatives of the more famous. We listened to U2 and Morrissey and Kylie Minogue post-ironically, which is not to say, exactly, sincerely. We donated to charity, served on the boards of not-for-profits, and shepherded socially responsible enterprises for work. We thought we were not bad people. Not the best, a bit spoiled, maybe, but pleasant, insouciantly decent. We paid a tax on the lives we lived, in order to say in public, I have sacrificed, tithed, given back. A system of pre-Lutheran indulgences. Of carbon offsets. A green-washing of our sins. We were affiliated. We had access. I was by far the poorest of our group, though I was not poor for principled reasons. I’m not sure why I was so poor. Laziness, perhaps. I didn’t have much energy or imagination when it came to monetizing my talents, and I think, to be honest, that I had a bad conscience about getting paid to do what I loved, what seemed, on the face of it, self-indulgent, and what never met my expectations anyway. So in the Palm Springs house that week, where I stayed on need-blind sufferance, I had the dual consciousness of a Voltaire in the court of Frederick the Great or the Marxists who brood through high-society parties in Wyndham Lewis novels—which is to say I partook, mooched, sponged, and felt myself apart and non-implicated. From the start I had been set up as the counterpart to Lily, a pretty and neurotic executive-in-training who was also not there as half of a couple. Lily had brought a tote bag for her cosmetics, which numbered in the dozens and included machines I was not familiar with. Like all the women in the house, she had exceptional hair. Her hair had the tattered elegance of a Rolling Stone cover model’s, and I decided early on that one of my goals for the week would be to sleep with Lily, though this was less a decision, really, than the final figure in some back-of-the-envelope biological math. Lily was in the habit of always needing things she didn’t have: water, iced tea, Chablis, spray-on sunscreen, her phone, Kindle, iPad, a hand, advice. I remark on this because, given that my position in the group was as a secular boyfriend of sorts to Lily, it often fell to me to fetch her things or to hold things for her while she did stuff like pee. But I also think that her constant fidgeting neediness captured something we all felt: the ever-present urge to tweak or adjust the experience to make it a touch more perfect. “Can you just hold this?” Lily would say, or “Can you just do my back?” or “Can you just come look at something?,” and I slowly understood what it is to be a man for a certain type of high-strung, successful, and thin woman: you are an avatar of capability, like a living Swiss Army knife. So I fixed things and it felt good, and maybe anyone could have fixed them, and maybe Lily only asked to flatter me, to give me a sense of purpose in a modern economy that had creatively destroyed men, but it worked, it allowed me to feel masculine and useful, and I experienced an uneasy gratification that Lily and I could confirm for each other this two-dimensional idea of who we were, who our genders made us, even as we recognized how stupid and old-fashioned the idea was. But this was a place to be old-fashioned, I guess. It was, after all, the town of Elvis and Charles Farrell, and the Rat Pack, of Jack Benny’s broadcasts from the desert, New Year’s at Sunnylands with the Reagans, and drives hooking off the fifth tee like the Laffer curve—a place in thrall to an era when the impulse was to leave the lush coastline for a desert town as seedy and plotted as an Elmore Leonard paperback, where pills were prescribed to be abused, drinks took their names from Dean Martin taglines, and the wedge salad never died. On the afternoon of Day Three, Eli and I took his dog, Lyle, for a walk, and he confessed to me that a good chunk of the financing for his new film had fallen through. One of the backers had pulled out, and now the production company attached to his script and the director and whatever hamlet-sized retinue a more or less green-lit film accretes were all scrambling to gin up new money. Eli had it on good intelligence that a financier named Wagner was in Palm Springs that week, and so one of our running intrigues became Eli’s attempt to casually intersect with him. The movie sounded like a hard sell to me, a bio-pic about the economist Albert O. Hirschman focussed on his war years, but Eli assured me that Wagner was their man. “This guy”—Eli brought his hands together as if in prayer. “You know Richard Branson? O.K. This guy is like the Richard Branson of nature and environment music. His wife’s cousin—or no, no, no. Here’s what it is. His wife’s mother’s sister, his aunt-in-law—Hirschman helped get her out in ’41.” It was not quite evening. The sun had fallen below San Jacinto as it did every afternoon, leaving us in a long penumbral dusk the color of a pinkish bruise. For the second straight day, we had missed the canyon hike we had intended to take, arriving seven minutes after the cutoff, according to the park ranger, who took evident pleasure in disappointing us and had the air less of a park ranger than of an actor playing a park ranger—I doubted that he did much “ranging.” And so, to salvage the excursion we had driven around the tony western edge of the city, taking in the walled-off, single-story period homes, including Elvis’s strange bow-window of a house, and we would have explored longer if we hadn’t wandered into a postmortem garage sale and found, laid out like memento mori among old Steve Martin Betamaxes, an assortment of superannuated chemotherapy supplies, which so depressed us that we each immediately took a bump off the key to Lily’s Nissan Leaf. Walking now with Eli, I was feeling a bristling love for my friend, who hadn’t said a word to me in five minutes, showing, in the understated way of competitive men, that our friendship transcended his need to sell other people on a garish idea of his life, that we could be quiet together and find peace in each other, for the simple reason that we had nothing else to offer each other, when I looked up to see a slight Hasidic man pacing a jogger down the middle of the street. The Hasid was in full getup, shuffle-walking to keep up with the jogging man and insistently pointing something out to him on a piece of paper. The jogger looked at us with a grin or a grimace that was perhaps self-excusing, but he needn’t have. It became clear to us in the days following: Chabad-Lubavitch was everywhere, South Williamsburg had emptied out into our corner of the California desert, bearded men in long black robes haunting our bacchanal, coy and twinkling with a great-avuncular look that seemed to say, You will understand in time, you will see—or maybe not. But it’s also possible that I was losing my mind. It was Day Three, as I said, and the wheels were beginning to come off. Lily and I had made out for a while in bed the night before, humping a bit halfheartedly before she sent me away to sleep by myself—and I had felt grateful, because this way I would actually sleep and wouldn’t have to wake up next to her, tired and noisome, with a single-minded erection, but I’d also felt spurned, or confused, because whereas Eli had the goal of finding and wooing Wagner, and Marta had the goal of treating her body like a chemistry set, and Lily had the goal of having a man around to hold her purse, and the others in the house had various faintly boring goals that involved their partners and spa treatments, my only goal up to that point had been to get laid in a state of near-primal cognitive disintegration. And so, when I awoke that morning and realized just how seriously in jeopardy this goal was, I promptly ate an entire rainbow Rice Krispies treat of marijuana and lost track of everything but a premonition that the world was going to end. I was lying motionless on the couch, under a protective throw that had become important to me, when Lily came over and started talking. She played with my hair while she talked, and I tried to think up one grammatical sentence that would indicate that I was still a human being. The only recognizable thought among the debris in my mind, however, was the sudden overpowering desire to have sex, and this wasn’t even a thought as such. If I had been in any state to speak, let alone make an argument, I would have brought a Christian martyr’s passion to the task of getting Lily receptive, but all I managed to say, interrupting her arbitrarily to say it, was “I’m very stoned.” Lily looked at me curiously. “Really?” she said. I was briefly furious at her—that she was so wrapped up in telling me whatever shit, none of which I could translate into meaningful ideation, anyway, that she had failed to notice that I was demonstrating the vital signs of a Pet Rock. Eli walked over to ask if I wanted lunch, or anything, or what did I want, and I said “no,” “maybe,” and “later,” in some order, and then I realized that there was something I wanted, though it wasn’t exactly a group activity, which was to lie on the bathroom floor and masturbate until I died. “Excuse me,” I said, getting up. I was not terribly steady on my feet and had to brace myself on furniture all the way to the bathroom, but I was excited, let’s say ludicrously excited, by the prospect of masturbating, and, more than that, even amazed that I had forgotten the possibility of masturbation as a sort of compromise-formation in my ongoing sham-coupledom with Lily. And though I could barely breathe or stand, the sensitivity I felt to the world just then was a revelation. I seemed to feel the blood in my body running along the inner banks of its vessels, a trembling life force lighting up my meridians like neon, and, as I pushed off from the free-form couch by the fireplace, the lone thought surfacing within me was something like: I know what a chakra is. In the bathroom, I locked the doors and stripped to nothing, put the cold-water tap on low, and lay down on the bathmat. Something like fevered joy clenched in my abdomen. If there is an end point to the confessional mode it is surely the things we think about while masturbating, but here goes: I thought of the breasts of a woman who had been at dinner the night before, big, heavy breasts. I thought of her telling me to fuck them, or maybe having multiple dicks, or a kind of “Matrix”-like displacement of dicks, and fucking her and her tits at the same time. I thought of ass-fucking. I thought of someone wanting it, maybe begging for it, maybe Lily. There were mirrors all over the bathroom, and I thought of fucking Lily standing up, of gazing at the mirror and our eyes meeting in a look that said, Wow, we are fucking and it feels awesome. I thought, Mental note: return to question of mirrors, why we like watching ourselves fuck in mirrors—then I forgot this immediately. I thought, This feels so good, and when it is over I will die, but there won’t be any reason to live anyway, so that’s fine. And I thought, What am I doing with my life? And I thought, Am I a good person or a bad person or just a person? And I thought, Am I powerful or weak? And I thought, Now’s maybe not the time. . . . And I thought, Let’s pretend powerful, just for now, let’s pretend I’m powerful and Lily’s powerful and I’m fucking her in the ass, and she’s asking for it, pleading probably, and our eyes meet in the mirror in a look of concern or coital oneness or existential hurt or gratitude that something could feel this good. Yes, that. Let’s pretend that. And I came just then, for the first time in my life, before even getting hard. I awoke on the morning of Day Four, New Year’s Eve, on a deflated air mattress, without any memory of having gone to sleep. It turned out that I was not licking Julie Delpy, after all, but holding Lyle in a kind of Pietà. When he saw that I was awake he began chewing on my hair, and I thought about going and getting into bed with Lily, then decided to conserve good will. I don’t mean to give the impression that sex is all I think about, but I am goal-oriented. I need goals. And I felt cheated out of something. Lily’s car kept breaking, and so did her toilet, and she needed water and grapes like several dozen times a day. I was getting all the bad boyfriend jobs, I felt, and none of the good. But in retrospect it wasn’t really about Lily, this sense of being cheated. I needed something to happen. Something new and totalizing to push forward a dithering life. I needed to remember what it felt like to live. And drugs were not just handmaiden or enabler but part and parcel of the same impossible quest, which you could say was the search for the mythical point of most vivid existence, the El Dorado of aliveness, which I did not believe in but which tantalized me nonetheless, a point of mastering the moment in some perfect way, seeing all the power inside you rise up and coincide with itself, suspending life’s give-and-take until you are only taking, claiming every last thing you’ve ever needed or wanted—love, fear, kinship, respect—and experiencing it all at the very instant that every appetite within you is satisfied. It’s a stupid dream, but there it is. And not a bad agenda for a day as far as agendas go, as far as days go. It was a perfect afternoon—each one was—and we mobilized early for our hike, nearly two hours before the closing time, which by that point had been embossed forever on our psyches. The sun hung in the southern sky at the height of a double off the left-field wall, hot and pleasant and a whitish color, slipping at its edges into a pale powdered blue that had the particulate quality of noise in a photograph. I was glad that we were going for the hike. It felt almost moral in the context, and even if it was a relatively level hike and only about an hour round trip, and there was a waterfall at the end, hidden among the sere folds of rock, I thought at least we would have to put something in, something of ourselves, some effort, to get whatever out. Our friend the ranger was waiting for us at the gate, and this time we approached him with an air of triumph, as though he had doubted our resolve but we had persevered and now things would be different. “Hey,” we said. “Hello,” he said, smiling a little, I thought. We looked at one another for a minute. “Trail’s closed,” he said. “Closes early today, on account of the holiday.” “Oh, come on,” Eli said. “You realize we’ve been here every day this week.” The ranger actually had his hands on his hips, as if posing for a catalogue photo. The olive-green uniform hung on him so perfectly that I wondered whether he wasn’t perhaps the fit model for the entire clothing line. “Park reopens January 2nd,” he said. “8 A.M. sharp.” “Is it because we’re Jews?” Marta asked. The ranger’s gaze, emerging from his tan and handsomely creased face, cast out to the distant escarpments on the far side of the valley. “Same rules for everyone,” he said. “Your hike is a piece of shit,” Eli informed him. “You can always hike the sagebrush trail,” he said, pointing vaguely to a boulder-strewn slope in the distance that seemed to rise, precipitously, toward nothing. “And the sagebrush trail has a waterfall?” I said. “Ha, ha. No,” the ranger said. We did hike the sagebrush trail. We hiked until boredom overtook us. At the top of the ridge, where we stopped, a Hasid in black robes stared out across the Coachella Valley, past the lush plot of Palm Springs, which sat in the dun funnel of mountains like a piece of sod on a field of dirt. I wondered what it would take to imagine my way into his mind. I tried to look out at the scene through his eyes and couldn’t. I could see it only through my eyes: the grid of roads, the golf courses twined around their fancy houses, the brassy glow of the sun catching on the mountain faces to the south, the lights of convenience stores blinking on in the dusk. Another mellow California evening, where the velour air seemed a kind of permission—to be cosmically insignificant, maybe—an evening exactly as lovely and forgiving as it was unsacred. Our steaks—the steaks we ate that night—had been cows that had eaten Lord knows how much grain, grain farmed using heavy machinery and fertilizer and then shipped on trucks; cows that had produced Lord knows how much waste and methane before they were slaughtered, before they were butchered and shipped to us on different trucks. It was a very special dinner, courtesy of the Maldives, Bangladesh, Venice. We were each supposed to say something, something meaningful or thankful, I suppose, that would begin to repay our debt to the cows and the people of Sumatra. I wanted to read a poem that had recently moved me. I’d been trying to read it every night, as a prelude to dinner or a coda to dinner, but things kept getting in the way. The mood, for instance. It wasn’t a very poem-y poem, but it was a poem, and I guess it had that against it. Still, it was funny and affecting, and I saw it as a sort of moral Trojan horse, a coy and subtle rebuke to everything that was going on, which would, in the manner of all great art, make its case through no more than the appeal and persuasiveness of its sensibility. The others would hear it and sit there dumbfounded, I imagined, amazed at the shallowness of their lives, their capacity nonetheless to apprehend the sublime, and the fact that I had chosen a life in which I regularly made contact with this mood. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t expect this state to last for more than forty-five seconds, but the poem had become meaningful to me, and I was about to read it when dinner was very suddenly ready, and then when dinner was over dessert appeared, and then there were post-dinner cigarettes, and then we got a call that our cabs were on the way and we had to hurry to clear the table so that we could all do a few lines before the next party. We crushed the coke into still finer powder and spread it, thin and beautiful, on the glass coffee table, and by the time we were all packed into two cabs any memory that I had been about to read a poem or that poetry was a thing that existed had vanished. “If I ask you something, will you promise not to get mad?”Buy the print » Eli had done a line or two himself, and I could feel him growing tense in the way he did, which I had come to know years before, when we were roommates in college. It was the tenseness of someone who gets almost everything he wants very easily actually wanting something he’s not sure he can get. The thing Eli wanted, most proximately, was Wagner, who we’d heard was at the party to which we were en route, and, yes, Eli wanted Wagner’s money, wanted the financing so that his film about Albert O. Hirschman could be made and play the festival circuit and make a bid to be picked up by Focus or Searchlight or whatever, but more than that, I think, Eli wanted to know that he could bag a fish as big as Wagner. To try to get his mind off things, I asked him who he liked in the Cotton Bowl, but he must not have heard me because he said, “It’s all the fucking drugs, drink some water when we get there,” and then I realized that we were shouting across six people from opposite ends of a taxi minivan. At the party, we were greeted by a contingent of bashful children in party hats who blew party horns and kazoos at us. I went directly to the kitchen and poured half a bottle of Aperol into a Solo Cup because—well, let’s assume I had a reason at the time. I didn’t know anyone, but I was feeling pretty great, when Eli came over to me and whispered in my ear. “Wagner’s here,” he said. “Where?” “Fuck if I know. This place is a catacombs.” I asked whether we should go looking. “In a minute,” Eli said. “Anyway, there’s something I want to ask you.” I followed him to a recessed living room—there were several—where we settled into the deep embrace of leather armchairs, draping our ankles over our knees, and had the following conversation while the seven or twelve other versions of us that appeared in the intricately mirrored wall had it, too. ME: So. ELI (after a beat): Are people happy? ME: Like, spiritually? Like, which people? ELI: Our friends, our group. Am I being a good host? ME: You’re making me sleep on an air mattress. ELI: I’m serious. ME: It sort of deflates every— ELI: Is there more I could be doing? ME: I’m not sure I know what we’re talking about. Are you happy? ELI (pausing for effect): I am so happy. It’s Marta, though. I mean, is this it? If we have kids, it’s going to change everything in our lives, hers more than mine. I want her to feel like she’s done all the things she wanted to do. ME: Yeah, I don’t think that’s the way it works. ELI: Meaning . . . ? ME: The bucket-list thing. I don’t buy it. There’s a hole in the bucket list! ELI: What hole? ME: Life, tomorrow, the astonishing insufficiency of memory . . . ELI: I just don’t want her to have regrets. ME: Jesus, don’t be insane. And, look, it’s not like there’s some perfect moment of some perfect evening when you go: That. That was it. That was living, and it doesn’t get any better, and now I can die. Or have kids. ELI (a little peevishly): I know. I was pretty out of it, but still it wasn’t lost on me that what I had just denied the truth of was exactly the fantasy I had let myself entertain throughout the trip. And I felt, realizing this, neither wise nor duplicitous but tired—tired of all the things that were equally true and not true, which seemed to be just about everything right then. “C’mon, let’s go find Marta and Lily,” Eli said, because we hadn’t seen them in a while and that could mean only one thing. And, sure enough, in the third bathroom we checked there was Lily speaking without punctuation, lining up lacy filaments of blow on the porcelain tank of the toilet while Marta did smoothing or plumping things to her eyelashes that only girls understand. And somehow the four of us squeezed into that bathroom, which was the size of a telephone booth, and did our lines and got most of the excess into our teeth, and Eli scraped what was left very carefully over the bevelled edge and into a bag the size of one Cheez-It. “We’re going to go find Wagner,” Eli announced. Lily and I looked at each other, or our eyes met in the wall of mirror before us, and we both made a motion to speak before realizing that there was nothing we meant to say. And, realizing this, we smiled, because maybe we were not in love, and maybe love is a chemical sickness, anyway, one that blinds us to who the person we love really is, but we were committed to each other, committed somehow to forgiving each other every stupid, careless, needy, and unpleasant thing we did or said that week. It didn’t take us all that long to find Wagner, though time had grown a bit fishy at this point. We scrabbled through doors and rooms, and when we got to the library a voice said, “Come in, come in,” as if it had been expecting us. The voice belonged to a man of perhaps seventy-one, who was sitting low behind a desk, sipping from a snifter of what looked like corrupted urine and talking on a phone that for an instant I took to be a large kitten. It was such a striking sight that I almost missed the Amazonian woman standing to the side in a studded black leather bra and garters. I did a double take, but she didn’t seem to register my gaze, just looked off glassily with impassive disgust and worked the tassels of her riding crop like a rosary. “Satellite,” Wagner told us, covering the mouthpiece with his hand. Then: “Yeah, yeah, go fuck yourself, Fred. Ten A.M.” “Mustique,” he said, putting the phone down. “I’m supposed to fly out tonight.” “Frank,” Eli said, and took a few larger-than-normal steps toward Wagner and held out his hand, smiling as if they were old war buddies whom a comedy of errors had kept apart for years. “Do I know you?” Wagner said. “I don’t think I know you.” Eli laughed his public laugh. “Eli. Eli Geller-Frucht,” he said. “I’m the writer on the Hirschman film. ‘Philosopher’s Whetstone’? Actually that title sucks, but Marley Jones at Buzzard told me her people talked to your people, she said you had a personal connection to the story—tell me if I’m making this up? Your wife’s family? So we’re thinking sort of a John Nash in ‘The Good Shepherd’ thing, but without all the schizophrenia, of course, and David’s got this big fucking man-crush on Louis Malle, so we’re doing kind of an ‘Au Revoir les Enfants’ open, very faithful to the spirit of Hirschman’s story, you know, but—” Wagner held up a hand as though in some vague pain. “Yeah, yeah, I get it. I talked to David. Look, I’m on board. I don’t give a fuck about Hirschman, but my wife, Lydia, she won’t shut up about ‘Nana would have wanted to see her Albie as Zac Efron’ or whatever. It’s fucking ridiculous, but you get to the point of certain understandings”—Wagner inclined his head toward the half-dressed woman in the corner—“and, well, you get the picture.” He put his hands on the desk and raised himself, and he must have been sitting in a comically small chair, because when he stood, far from being the wizened troll I had come to imagine, he loomed over both of us, six-four easy, with an elegant and gawky grace. “Here,” he said, “give me some of that blow you’re on and I’ll let you in on a secret.” Eli reached into his pocket without taking his eyes off Wagner and passed him the bag. The man looked at us like we had to be joking but then produced a two-inch piece of straw from the breast pocket of his jacket and snorted everything that was left, right from the plastic. He thumbed his nose and sniffed a few times, then gave a small shrug of disdain and settled, half sitting, on the front of the desk. “That coke sucks, but I’ll tell you, anyway,” he said. “Here’s what I was going to say: Stop giving so much of a shit.” We blinked at him. “What do you mean?” I said. I love that you can ask people what they mean right after they’ve said the most obvious things and almost invariably they’ll assume that they are the ones who’ve failed to be clear and go to elaborate lengths to make themselves understood. Wagner looked at me, then turned to Eli. “Your friend’s retarded,” he said. “What I mean is—look, if you care about something, like horses, go raise horses. Go ride them and fuck them or whatever people do with horses. Sell them to Arabs, I’d guess. But if you’re going to stay in this crappy business, and they’re all crappy, stop giving a shit. Because you’re here for one reason and you should know what that reason is. Do you?” He looked from one of us to the other, then barked “Sonia!,” and we jumped, but Sonia didn’t. She just walked over and spanked us both insanely hard on the ass with her riding crop. “The reason you’re here,” Wagner said, “is that you already have nice cars”—I didn’t, but I went along with the spirit of his admonition—“and girlfriends with that taut skin, and nice rentals in the hills—or maybe you own?” He looked at us doubtfully. “But you don’t have the good stuff, do you, the really hard-to-come-by shit. You know what I’m talking about: Envy. Serious, irrefutable reasons for people to envy you. And not just any sort of people, of course. You need people well informed enough to understand just how enviable you are. And people clever enough to know how to show their envy without being sycophants, and worldly enough to be charming company while they’re envying you. . . . You need courtiers, see? Oh, they’re better and worse than friends. They don’t care about you, sure, but they understand the terms of your success far better than a friend ever could. And so when you forget why you did all the shit you did, all you have to do is look at their greedy, glowing, envious faces and say, ‘Ah, yes. That’s why.’ ” Wagner stared out the sliding glass doors for a minute, while Sonia cracked walnuts on a teak coffee table with the blunt end of a bowie knife, then he continued more softly. “And here’s the really fucked-up thing,” he said. “When you’ve bloated yourself on all the envy a person can take and you’re still not satisfied, you’ll see there’s only one place left to go. You have everything that can be bought, all the blow jobs the people who covet your power can give, but what you don’t have, you’ll see, is pain. And that’s where Sonia comes in. Sure, I pay her. But she would hate me just as much if I didn’t. And that’s real.” He sipped his drink contemplatively. “It’s the realest thing in the world.” He shook his head, as though to clear away the cobwebs of this sentimentality, and it must have worked, because he started again in a livelier tone. “It reminds me of when Nietzsche and I had our falling-out,” he said. “Wait,” I said. “Hold on. You’re the real Wagner?” He looked at me with what I think was hatred. “There is really something wrong with your friend,” he said to Eli. “Of course I’m not the real Wagner. How much fucking blow did you do? I’m talking about David Nietzsche. The exec over at Iscariot?” Well, I’m not going to dwell on this chapter of the night any longer. We got out as soon as we could. The change of year, we discovered, had come and gone. We’d missed the countdown and the kisses. Marta put a silly hat on Eli, and Lily kissed me chastely. I won’t bore you with the rest: the long unaccountable conversation I had about Gaelic football, or buying more coke in a bathroom at the Ace, or skinny-dipping at the Ace and getting kicked out, or sneaking back in and waking up among the patio furniture cuddling a metal vase full of flowers. I found Lily asleep in the faux ship-rigging of a window arrangement, and after a while, when I got her untangled, we walked home, her tripping in high heels, me carrying a bag that turned out not to be hers (or a bag), then later carrying her, then climbing a wall to fetch her shoes after she threw them, in either joy or rage, into the koi pond of a meditation center. At home we each peed while the other showered. Lily removed her contacts while I kissed her shoulders, then she applied three different lotions to her face. When we finally lay down, I said, “Look, we’re here, we’re happy, it’s a new year, let’s just . . .” Lily sat up partway and looked at me. Her blemish-free face looked tired and sober all of a sudden, a bit how I picture the Greek Fates when I picture them—handsome, pristine, sadly knowing. “The thing is,” Lily said, “we could and I’m sure it would feel good. And it’s not like sex is any big deal. But we’re old enough now to know some things, to know what happens next, to know that we have sex and then we text and e-mail for a bit, and then you come visit me, or I come visit you, and we start to get a little excited and talk about the thing to our friends, and then we get a little bored because our friends don’t really care, and we remember that we live in different places and think, Who the fuck are we kidding?, and then we realize that we were always just a little bored, and the e-mails and text messages taper off, and the one of us who’s a bit more invested feels hurt and starts giving the whole thing more weight than it deserves—because these things become referendums on our lives, right?—and so we drift apart and the thought of the other person arouses a slight bitterness or guilt, depending on who’s who at this point, and when the topic of the other person comes up we grit our teeth and say, ‘Yeah, I know him,’ or, ‘Yeah, I know her’—and all that for a few fucks that aren’t even very good, because we’re drunk and hardly know each other and aren’t all that into it anyway.” “We could get married,” I said. “Don’t be cute,” Lily said. “I like you better when you’re not cute.” I may have looked a little hurt, because she said, “Hey, but don’t feel bad. I really do like you. I don’t want you to feel rejected. That’s not what this is.” Really? It wasn’t? Well, yes and no. She didn’t want me to feel rejected but she did want to reject me. Still, Lily’s reasoning was very sensible, and she was right that I was bored, I am often bored, and I felt a strange relief and, behind the relief, a faint sadness. It was sadness about a lot of things, but perhaps, most simply stated, it was regret that we had grown self-knowing enough to avoid our mistakes. I left Lily’s room and walked right into Eli and Marta’s, because I thought I should tell Eli what I had just understood, he being a screenwriter and all—that our lives had become scripts, that love had become a three-act formula worthy of Robert McKee—but then I saw that he and Marta were going at it, Eli behind her, while they watched themselves in the mirrored doors of the wall closet. When they saw me, they paused mid-thrust, and I said, “Oh, God, sorry,” and Marta blinked and said, “It’s fine, sweetie,” and Eli kind of surreptitiously finished the suspended thrust and said, “Yeah, no biggie. What’s up?” We all felt amazingly good the next day. This seemed remarkable, but it was the truth. The coke had somehow burned off whatever residue encrusts on you throughout the year: free radicals, shame, whatever. We felt unashamed. We were done auditioning for one another and could now be friends, or not-friends, but ourselves. We left for Joshua Tree that morning. It was the same day it always was, but that day was beautiful, and although the park was busy by the time we got there we didn’t care. We climbed a rock pile and ate a sandwich bag of mushrooms and lay contented in the sun. There were families around, white families and Latino families and Asian families, and everyone said, “Happy New Year,” all of us very pleased, it seemed, that we had something to say to one another. There were people rock-climbing and tightrope-walking on a distant butte, and we hiked over to them, while distances took on a subtle fun-house deception and the rocks grew more interesting and our bodies less reliable. The sun tore through the tissue of the sky. The stone-littered ochre valley below recalled a time when humans and dinosaurs had shared the earth—not a real time, of course, but the time in our collective imagination when we were the scrappy dreamers, and they were the powerful monsters, and we all had a lot more business with volcanoes. We ate lunch on the low wall of a lookout. You could see down into the Coachella Valley to the south, see the Salton Sea and the San Andreas Fault, which ran like a post-Impressionist margin in the landscape, but I was mostly focussed on my sandwich, the way the Gala apple and the country-style mustard interacted with the sharp white Cheddar and the arugula, how the tastes all came together and produced nuances in their interaction that I had never encountered before. I was tripping very deeply and beautifully at this point, and I strolled to the top of a nearby sightseeing hillock. It must have been the presence of another Hasid there that accounted for the turn my thoughts took, because I remember thinking, You and I are not so different. We are desert people, sons of a Trimalchio race. We come to places like this, where there is nothing, and don’t see nothing. We see a long, trailing history of wandering and persecution and the melancholic fruits of so much lineal sharpening. But then I remembered the truth, which was that I didn’t really have a “people” or a “race,” not as such. I was a mutt, like everyone, and whatever confluent strands had produced me had their own chapters of persecution and oppression, or, to be less polite-society about it, of rape and forced labor and murder. “Pretty amazing,” I said to my fellow-gazer, and I was briefly proud of myself for coming up with something so appropriate, when the gazer turned and I saw that he was not a Hasid, after all, but just a teen-ager in a black hoodie, and he looked at me and his eyes said, unmistakably, “You can do one of two things right now, and both of them are to go fuck yourself.” And I thought, Well, O.K. You’re sixteen. I’d probably feel the same way. And then I thought I had to shit very badly, so I went to the single-occupancy bathroom and waited with a twelve-year-old boy while his mother shat inside. And that seemed poignant to me, too, his waiting for his mother, our uneasy and yet companionable waiting, and for a second it occurred to me that perhaps I was travelling back to my own birth along a sequence of encounters with boys of diminishing ages. But I wasn’t. I just had a stomachache, it turned out. The early evening was upon us, a dwindling and rapturous light invigorating the mountains as we debouched from the hills, descending to the Cholla Cactus Garden and the smoldering twilit valley below. The cactuses themselves appeared to glow, as round and chartreuse as tennis balls, the air wholesome with a hovering feculence, and we stood together, smiling with goofy acquiescence at all that we felt and lacked the words to speak. We ate the last caps and stems of the mushrooms. We were high, but we weren’t courting death. We were just some nobody hustlers in the desert, trying to make a film about the economist Albert O. Hirschman, trying to read a poem and be present together and save the shards of hearts splintered many times in incautious romance from further comminution, trying to keep up with our Instagram and Twitter feeds and all the autodocumentary imperatives of the age, trying to keep checking items off our private bucket lists, because pretty soon we would have babies and devote our lives to giving them the right prods and cushioning so that they could grow up to be about as bad and as careful as we were, and avoid stepping with too big a carbon footprint on our African and Asian brothers and sisters and the Dutch. We were looking for a moment, not a perfect moment but a moment in which the boundaries of ourselves and the world grew indistinct and overlapped. We were not heroes. We were trying to find ways not to be villains. The sun was setting and we were rising—me, Marta, Eli, and Lily—the four of us in a Prius, experiencing a transcendental glee as we rode back through Twentynine Palms and the towns of Joshua Tree and Yucca Valley, the whole thing one unbroken span of luminous development, or so it seemed, more beautiful than you can imagine. We were listening to a late Beatles album very loud, finding folds within the music that seemed never to have been there before and unlikely to be there again. Lily, every few minutes, burst out laughing wildly, I don’t know why. We petted each other a little, sensually, asexually, then we passed into the Coachella Valley, swept down, down into the vast grid of lights, so many colors, all communicating with one another in a lattice of shifting and persistent harmony. And as we returned to the valley floor, where the windmills blinked red and the stars through our open windows were small rounded jewels in the great velvet scrim of night, Lily spoke. “It’s like . . . it was all choreographed for me,” she said, her voice hushed and marvelling. “Like everything was arranged for me. To experience just like this.” It took me a second to realize what she was saying and what it meant, to gather my thoughts and say the only thing there was to say. “But that’s what it is,” I said. “That’s what being on drugs is.”

Her sisters flinched because she was the youngest, but she looked so old. Jeanne was just seventy-four, and no one had ever thought . . . They didn’t speak of it. They would not allow themselves, but Helen was eighty, Sylvia seventy-eight. They’d married first, been mothers first. They were older. They should have been frailer. How could Jeanne be first to go? Their baby sister lay propped up on pillows. Jeanne, who had celebrated her first birthday in eyelet lace, a slice of cake on the tray of her high chair, and her sisters on either side. Their living doll, with her blond curls and round blue eyes. They’d pulled her in their wagon over grass bumpy with apples from the apple tree. It was dreadful to approach her now—her hair just wisps, her voice nearly gone, her cough breaking every sentence. Horror, pity, shame. They felt all that at once, to see her now and to remember her as she had been. They were sorry and they were glad to feel so alive, their steps firm in their low-heeled shoes. Their own bodies sound, rejoicing with each breath. What a terrible thing to say! They would never have admitted it. Their own strength, their own good fortune and their guilt—they could never put it into words. No one should! “How are you, darling?” Helen asked. Jeanne didn’t answer. “Did you see the orchid Richard sent?” Sylvia turned a tall white orchid toward Jeanne’s chair. Jeanne glanced at her nephew’s gift. There were so many. Blossoms filled the first-floor music studio where Jeanne had to live because she couldn’t take the stairs. The orchid from Richard, the sunflowers from her daughter-in-law, Melanie, the roses from the Auerbachs next door. Wherever she looked, she saw arrangements from neighbors, nieces, grandchildren. The piano tuner had sent a basket of mums, which were losing petals, shedding everywhere. The cards said, “All our love,” and “Thinking of you,” and even “Healing light.” This from her niece Wendy, the music therapist. “Look how beautiful they are,” Sylvia said. She meant, Do you see how much everybody loves you? Jeanne made a face. The flowers depressed her, especially those that were already wilting. When she looked at the mums, she felt she wasn’t dying fast enough. Her sisters sat chattering about the heat, the traffic, and the rain. They were afraid to leave her alone—although she had lived by herself for fifteen years, a widow. She lived alone because she liked it. Her late husband had been difficult, to say the least. According to Jeanne’s sons, her Tudor home was much too big. According to Phoebe, her twenty-year-old granddaughter, Jeanne’s house wasted energy. For years, everybody had been telling Jeanne to move. Now nobody mentioned it. These were the privileges of hospice. You didn’t have to blow insulation into your walls. No one suggested assisted living or criticized your carbon footprint, which would disappear entirely in weeks, or even days. On the other hand, everyone came to see you and confide in you. Jeanne didn’t believe in God or any kind of afterlife, but lung cancer made believers of her family, so that she, who despised superstition, became a touchstone and talisman to the rest of them. Her sisters were always pressing her cold hands. Helen told Jeanne, “Pam and Wendy are coming up this weekend.” Jeanne nodded. “Richard’s coming, too,” Sylvia said. Her only child was having a terrible time, switching jobs, divorcing, and she felt he deserved credit for dropping everything to see his aunt. Pam was coming up from Providence, and Wendy lived in Brooklyn, but Richard had to drive all the way from Philly. Jeanne closed her eyes and listened to her sisters say, She’s tired. She’s exhausted. She heard them echo and repeat each other. She has to rest. Yes, she has to rest. She was looking at the sun, red through her closed eyelids. The autumn sun felt good, but darkness was better, because everybody left except Shawn, the night nurse. Then Jeanne lay awake in her rented hospital bed and listened to symphonies and choral rhapsodies, quartets, and concertos on WGBH, Boston’s classical radio. When she heard a solo violin, her fingers curled reflexively; her left hand knew. Her sons had pushed away her music stands and moved the piano to make room for Shawn, now dozing in his straight-backed chair. Jeanne assumed he had another job during the day, and she saw that he was trying to study as well. He was always reading a textbook, but he never got very far. Just before dawn, the book slipped off his lap onto the floor. Shawn started up and saw Jeanne staring at him from her bed. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ma’am.” He bent down for the book. She said, “You rest.” “No, I’m here if you need something.” “Sleep.” His eyes widened. There was no way he was going back to sleep. He’d lose his job. “I’ll let you know if anything happens,” Jeanne said. Her sons and their wives came to see her every afternoon. First, Steve and Andrea would sit by her side. Andrea showed videos on her phone of their huge boys, born just eighteen months apart, lion cubs who played high-school soccer. They were coming to see Jeanne right after regionals. Andrea was going to drive them straight from the field, cleats and all. Next came Dan and Melanie. They had just the one daughter, Phoebe. Melanie had gained fifty pounds when she was pregnant. She never had another child, and she never lost the weight. “Phoebe sends her love,” Melanie said. Dan explained, “She wants to be here, but she won’t fly.” Jeanne tried to picture her ecological granddaughter biking from Ann Arbor. She imagined Phoebe’s long blond hair streaming out from under her helmet. “Her schoolwork is more important.” “Actually, she’s taking the semester off,” Melanie said. “What was that?” Dan frowned, upset with Melanie for mentioning this. “She says she wants to work with her hands.” “Preferably in the dirt,” Melanie said. “She wants to be a farmer and write poetry.” Jeanne couldn’t help laughing. Her breath came short and quick. For a few moments, she couldn’t breathe at all, and then she couldn’t see. With help from her day nurse, Lorraine, Jeanne sat up, and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I don’t think dropping out is funny,” Dan said. “She isn’t dropping out,” Melanie said. “She just needs a little time.” Jeanne croaked, “Let her do what she wants.” Dan and Melanie looked crushed, and Jeanne felt sorry for them—but why did everyone expect her to be so concerned? Illness did not bring out the angel in her. At first, she’d appreciated visitors, but as she lingered on they didn’t leave. Her sisters kept bringing in their middle-aged children—for what? Goodbyes? Advice? Some final blessing? Sylvia begged, “Tell Richard to stop smoking!” Oh, really, Jeanne thought. That’s what I am. Exhibit A. She studied her ruddy nephew. His wife had just won custody of the children, and the dog. “I enjoyed smoking,” Jeanne said. “Your mother did, too.” Sylvia shrank back as though Jeanne had struck her, but she said nothing. It was too late, apparently, to retaliate. Jeanne’s sons appeared, and they looked terrible, both of them. Dan wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was thick in the middle and he had hardly any hair. It amused and saddened Jeanne to see him look so much like his late father. As for Steve, he had a bad back, so he had to walk around the room. He made Jeanne dizzy, pacing up and down. Her daughters-in-law got emotional—especially Melanie, herself a doctor. Please, Jeanne thought. I lost my parents when I was half your age. We’re all over fifty here. She pretended to sleep, and then she really did drop off. When she woke, her sisters were hovering over her. Some of us have overstayed our welcome, Jeanne thought. And then, with sudden shock, No: I’m the one. That would be me. Sardonic as she was, husk that she was, she shuddered at the thought of disappearing, of losing consciousness and irony, her music, her unrenovated house, her sun. Cancer had consumed her body, drugs clouded her mind. Even so, Jeanne held on. Barely eating, scarcely speaking, she endured. Her nieces and her nephew sat with her. Wendy sang and strummed her battered guitar. Jeanne’s soccer-playing grandsons arrived. Zach cracked his knuckles. Nate jiggled his right leg. The boys were like a pair of jackrabbits, all ears and feet. The hospice nurses said that Jeanne would drift away in a day or two, but four days passed, and then a fifth. It was awkward, because her sons had to take off work, and her grandchildren could miss only so many days of school. Should they stay or should they go? Did it make sense to return home and then come right back for the funeral? Helen said, “We need a plan.” Oldest and bossiest, she told Jeanne, “We need to know your wishes.” “To get up,” Jeanne said immediately. Later, in the hall, Sylvia turned on Helen. “How can you speak to her like that?” Helen was amazed at the question. “Well, we can’t ask her when she’s gone!” Sylvia began to cry. “Don’t get hysterical,” Helen snapped. “I’m not hysterical. I have feelings. Be considerate.” “I am considerate,” Helen said. “I’m doing for Jeanne what I hope someone would do for me. If I didn’t have a living will.” Weeping, Sylvia retreated to the dining room to criticize her husband, Lew. That afternoon, at Jeanne’s bedside, Helen appealed to her daughter Pam, a tax attorney. “She left no instructions.” At the word “instructions,” Jeanne opened her eyes. It was disconcerting the way she did that. Just as Helen slipped into the past tense, Jeanne roused herself. Then everyone hurried to her side again. Sons and daughters-in-law watched Jeanne’s face. “Melanie,” Jeanne whispered. “What is it?” Melanie asked. Already the tears. Always the tears. “Half a bagel,” Jeanne said. That sent them off again, scrambling to Rosenfeld’s. The two couples took Dan’s Volvo to Newton Centre, even as they told each other there was no way. Melanie, the doctor, said, “She’ll never eat a whole half a bagel.” “Does that matter?” Dan demanded, as he drove. “No,” Melanie said. “Of course not.” “If my mother wants half a bagel, she’s getting half a bagel.” Melanie said, “No poppy. She could aspirate the seeds.” “Get her an egg bagel,” Steve suggested from the back seat. Andrea corrected him. “She doesn’t like egg. She likes plain.” By the time they returned with a dozen bagels, two large containers of whipped cream cheese, a side of lox, and a chocolate babka, Jeanne was sleeping again. The nurses stopped predicting when she would drift away. Now they said that only Jeanne would know when it was time. Lorraine suggested that everybody share a moment. Was there unfinished business in the family? Sometimes people had to forgive each other before they could let go. Tremulous, angelic, Sylvia told Helen, “I forgive you.” “Oh, for God’s sake,” Helen said. There was nothing to forgive. There was simply the great divide between them: Helen told the truth, while Sylvia tried to paper over everything. “She never listens to me,” Sylvia told the family assembled at Jeanne’s bedside. “I’m invisible to her.” Amazed at this mixed metaphor, Helen said, “Obviously I see you.” At this point, Dan spoke up. “I think we need to focus on the time we have together.” “Amen,” Lorraine said, and everyone was jealous, because she liked Dan best. Look at you, Jeanne thought. All vying for attention! Even so, she forgave everybody. Good night, she told them silently. Farewell. She wished that she could send a blanket dispensation. After which she could stay and they would leave. “This place was better before they tore it down.”Buy the print » In fact, she looked a little better. She drank some juice and tried a bite of toast. She asked for her violin. She couldn’t play it. She couldn’t even open the case, but she kept it near her on the window ledge next to her bed. She wanted her instrument where she could see it. Like a cat, Jeanne slept most of the day, but, waking, she seemed a heightened, sharper version of herself. When Pam drove up from Providence for the second time, Jeanne asked why she’d never married. When Melanie sniffled, Jeanne said, “Stop feeling sorry for yourself.” Obviously, Melanie was sad because she was afraid of her own death. Jeanne could see it in her eyes. Jeanne’s sisters were even worse. They looked at her and thought only of their mortality. But this was cruel! Not just unkind. Untrue. Jeanne’s sisters thought nothing of themselves. Sylvia berated Lew all the way home to Weston. Helen stayed up late in Brookline, baking. Lemon squares, and brownies, pecan bars, apple cake, sandy almond cookies. Alone in her kitchen, she wrapped these offerings in waxed paper and froze them in tight-lipped containers. Her husband, Charles, ventured, “You should get some rest.” What a thing to say! How could anybody rest? Helen had not pursued a career like Jeanne, the music teacher, or three successive husbands, like Sylvia. No, Helen had always been a homemaker. Now her family needed sustenance, so she doubled every recipe and froze half. After all, there would be a memorial service, and shivah afterward. Helen could already picture Jeanne’s students descending with their parents. Sylvia hadn’t baked in years, because Lew was diabetic. As for Melanie and Andrea—what would they throw together? A box of doughnut holes? No. Helen was the baker of the family. What she felt could not be purchased. She grieved from scratch. And yet Jeanne kept on living. Her sisters held vigil; her sons came up on weekends. In the kitchen, her family nibbled Helen’s lemon squares. Melanie urged brownies on the nurses. “Take these,” she told Lorraine. “We can’t eat them all, but Helen won’t stop baking.” “Sweetheart,” Lorraine said, “everybody mourns in her own way.” Helen mourned her sister deeply. She arrived each day with shopping bags. Her cake was tender with sliced apples, but her almond cookies crumbled at the touch. Her pecan bars were awful, sticky-sweet and hard enough to break your teeth. They remained untouched in the dining room, because Helen never threw good food away. Sometimes Jeanne asked in a confused voice why everyone had come. And then there were moments when she remembered and took charge. She ordered Melanie to take all the plants and flowers to Newton-Wellesley Hospital. She told Wendy to put her guitar away. After this, she asked to speak to her sons alone. She lay in bed and watched Dan and Steve approach. This is it, the two of them were thinking. “We’ll see,” Jeanne said. Guilty, nervous, Steve asked, “What did you say?” “These are my wishes,” Jeanne said. Dan pulled up a chair, but Steve paced up and down. “Stop that.” “What are your wishes?” Dan asked. “First of all”—Jeanne looked at Steve—“don’t pace. Second of all . . .” They waited. “No funeral.” “A private burial?” Dan ventured. “No burial.” Astonished, Steve said, “You have the plot.” He might as well have added, And it’s paid for. “I don’t want it.” Steve protested, “But it’s next to Dad.” “Yes, I am aware of that.” Dan’s glasses were fogging up. He took them off and wiped them on the bottom of his sweater. “You shared your life with Dad for thirty-eight years.” “Exactly.” If Jeanne had another plan, she did not reveal it to her sons. If she had a good word to say about their father, she did not say it. Fiercely, she insisted that there would be no burial. No memorial. Privately, she decided not to die. Jeanne’s voice grew stronger as she kept living. Outside, the leaves were turning. AAA Sparkling Windows and Gutters called to schedule a cleaning. Still, she endured. Uneasily, the family dispersed. Jeanne’s grandsons returned to school. Jeanne’s sons and their wives went back to work. Even Melanie stopped crying. Her mother-in-law was a medical miracle. She was going to outlast them all. Only the nurses kept the faith. Lorraine said that sometimes older people held on for an occasion. They willed themselves to stay alive for one final milestone. A wedding. A grandchild’s graduation. No one could think of a milestone, apart from Richard’s divorce. Nobody was marrying or graduating. The next family birthday was in May. Everyone had shared a moment. Nieces and nephew and grandchildren had . . . Wait! They’d forgotten Phoebe, writing poetry in Michigan, working with her hands, refusing to fly. Melanie and Dan spoke to Phoebe on the phone. They called her from Jeanne’s house, and then Melanie called again from the car as Dan drove home. She talked to Phoebe about respect and compassion—thinking about others, not just about the earth. Meanwhile, Helen and Sylvia kept coming every day, baleful, fearful, sorry for their lot. Helen wanted to bring her rabbi to the house. “No rabbis,” Jeanne said. “No members of the clergy.” “Well, what would you suggest?” Helen demanded. Sylvia cried, “How dare you scream at her?” “Only one of us is screaming,” Helen said. Sylvia left the room, and then she left the house. Maybe she raised her voice at times. Maybe she felt overwhelmed. The situation was overwhelming. Jeanne’s death unimaginable, and now—even worse—postponed. There was nothing to be done, and yet Helen managed to do it. As usual, she took over everything. Sylvia was up all night, she was so upset. “It’s all about Helen,” Sylvia told Lew. “Her plan, her rabbi, her stale old pecan bars.” Columbus Day, when the family gathered at the house, Sylvia arrived with fresh-baked apple cake, warm from her oven, fragrant in its pan. Heads up, suddenly alert, Jeanne’s huge grandsons sniffed the cake. Can I have a piece? Can I have some? In the kitchen, Sylvia turned the cake out on a plate and sliced big wedges for the boys. Then Dan and Melanie had pieces, as did Steve and Andrea. In the dining room, Helen’s defrosted brownies, pecan bars, and almond cookies sat undisturbed. Charles did take a brownie out of loyalty, but he slipped into the kitchen for Sylvia’s cake. “I smell baked apples,” Jeanne whispered in the studio. The bed seemed to swallow her up, and yet she spoke. “It’s my recipe,” Helen said. “I gave that recipe to Sylvia twenty years ago.” “Yes, I remember,” Jeanne said. “She bakes a very good apple cake.” “I bake the same one! I brought you apple cake last week!” “I know, but I like hers better,” Jeanne said. Helen marched into the kitchen and gazed at the last crumbs of Sylvia’s cake. Zach and Nate were eating standing up. Melanie and Dan, Steve and Andrea, were eating at the table. Then Helen caught her own husband throwing away a paper plate. “Et tu, Charles,” Lew said. “You used my recipe,” Helen told Sylvia. “Yes, I did,” Sylvia replied, with such an air that even Zach and Nate knew she meant, What’s it to you? The next day, Sylvia brought her homemade jelly rolls, soft sponges rolled with tangy apricot, dusted on top with coconut flakes. She had not baked jelly rolls in fifteen years, and the whole family fell upon them. Even Lew, so careful with his diet, took a tiny piece. Only Helen and Jeanne abstained. Helen would not, and Jeanne could not partake. She was sick of visitors, but she made an effort to say a few words to each one. She advised her younger son, Dan, to look into hair-replacement therapy. She told Melanie to try antidepressants. Maybe they would help her lose some weight. As for Steve and Andrea, they were neglecting music. Neither of their boys played an instrument. Jeanne told Andrea to look into marching band, since the boys loved sports so much. Or, if they refused to practice, there were youth choirs. With some ear training, they might learn to sing. Andrea was speechless for a moment. Then she said slowly, “I realize that music is important to you.” “My life,” Jeanne whispered. “Would you like to see your students?” Steve asked. Jeanne thought of her young violinists—George, with his sweet tone and his tendency to rush. Sophie, who forgot to count. Wyatt had a good ear but didn’t work at all. Emma would not relax her tight goat-trill vibrato. Andrea said, “Would you like some of them to come and play for you?” “God, no,” Jeanne said. Sisters, sons, daughters-in-law were always begging to know what they could do. Jeanne gazed out the window at her sugar maple, and she told them what she wanted, since they asked. They carried her into the garden, where she could see the trees. Tethered to her wheelchair and to her oxygen, she turned her face up to the fiery maples, the gold oaks, the breezy sky. How good the world smelled, the fresh damp grass. She leaned back and she smiled, and her family thought she was at peace. They were wrong. She was not at peace; quite the opposite. She was happy. Full of plans. She told Helen she would see the rabbi. She would have a conversation with him. “Thank you,” Helen said. Rabbi Lieberman, when he arrived the next day, looked about twelve. He could have come for lessons. He wore a suit, but he seemed to Jeanne not much bigger than a child. “Jeanne wanted to have a conversation with you,” Helen said. Jeanne told the rabbi, “You should know that I’m an atheist.” The rabbi nodded. “Yes, I understand.” Jeanne added, “I don’t have time for organized religion.” “You’re in good company,” the rabbi said. Jeanne frowned to find him so accommodating. Didn’t rabbis believe anything anymore? “But you believe in God,” she said. “I do.” Jeanne looked at Helen. “That’s a relief, ” she said. “You see?” Helen told her sister, and she meant, You see, it’s a relief, a comfort to think of the Creator. “You see?” “Belief is very personal,” the rabbi said. “I agree,” Jeanne said. “That’s why we should keep it to ourselves.” The rabbi smiled. “My family would like to bury me.” Helen broke in. “You know that’s not true.” “They want to bury me next to my late husband,” Jeanne said. “I would like to go somewhere else.” “Where would you like to go?” “I’d like to be scattered,” Jeanne said. “Cremated?” Rabbi Lieberman asked delicately. “That’s not Jewish,” Helen declared. Jeanne looked at the rabbi, who seemed reluctant to speak. “It’s not our tradition,” the rabbi said at last. “Good.” “And how will we visit you?” Helen demanded. Jeanne said, “Why do you assume that I want visitors?” Helen’s tears startled Jeanne. Not you, she thought. Helen never cried. “I would visit,” Helen said. “Oh, fine,” Jeanne said. “Go ahead and bury me. I won’t mind.” “Thank you,” Helen whispered. After all, Jeanne reasoned, she would never feel it. She wouldn’t even know. “Do what you want,” she told her sister. “Cover me with rocks.” They wore her down. They came in shifts. Jeanne closed her eyes and listened to the house. Doors closing. Water running. The crackle of crumbs flying up the vacuum cleaner. Raised voices. Furious words. Helen baked mandelbrot from their mother Esther’s recipe. Sylvia countered with Esther’s honey cake. Jeanne tasted none of it, but she remained the cause, the crux of the matter, the still fixed point of the entire family. How long had she been sleeping? When would she wake? She was as surprised as anyone to find herself alive each morning. She opened her eyes and everyone turned to her as to an oracle. She did her best to keep them busy. “Take a day off,” she told Helen. “Serve on a committee.” She turned to Sylvia. “Bring me another apple cake.” “You’re angry at me,” Helen told Jeanne later when they were alone. Jeanne shook her head. “You’re angry because I have beliefs.” Jeanne said, “I don’t hold any of your beliefs against you.” She said this, but she added silently, I do think less of you. “We may not understand Millennials, but, as God is my witness, we’ll take their money.”Buy the print » “Sylvia covers her apples with brown sugar,” Helen said. “She sugars everything.” “Of course she does,” Jeanne said. After all, people liked sweet things. Anything sweet and easy. The bitter, dark, and complicated could not compete. This had always pained her before, but she enjoyed the injustice of it now. Joy mixed with fear as she looked out the window and saw scarlet trees. How dazzling the world was. How strange. She heard voices at her door and saw a beautiful girl, dressed all in rags. At last, her granddaughter, Phoebe, had arrived with her gold hair trailing down her back. She’d come on the bus from Michigan, and she’d brought a young man, a huntsman in a rough leather shirt. Jeanne clasped her granddaughter’s hand, but Phoebe started back, shocked by Jeanne’s ghastly face. Oh, you’re afraid of me, Jeanne thought. Grandmother, what big eyes you have, what withered cheeks. “Sharp nails,” Phoebe murmured, looking down at Jeanne’s claws. The wolf inside Jeanne whispered, The better to eat you with, my dear. But Jeanne said, “Introduce me.” Phoebe didn’t understand. Jeanne turned to Phoebe’s deerslayer. “What’s your name?” “I’m Christian.” Jeanne had no breath, but laughter racked her body anyway. She held on to Phoebe, and she began to shake. Dan and Melanie did not find Phoebe’s boyfriend funny, nor did they laugh about his name. He was twenty-eight years old, without a full-time job. He said he wanted to raise blueberries. They did not appreciate meeting him like this. They did not appreciate meeting him at all. He sat on the couch with his arms wrapped around Phoebe, as though she belonged to him. They couldn’t even have a conversation with their daughter. And yet Christian withstood every hint and every disapproving look. He nuzzled their only child, and he ate. Unblinking, he finished off Helen’s pecan bars. He devoured Sylvia’s apple cake. Now that Phoebe had arrived, Jeanne was supposed to let go, but she stayed alive to gaze at Phoebe’s lovely face. “Where’s your violin?” she asked. Phoebe looked down at her hiking boots. “You sold it, didn’t you?” Phoebe began to cry. “It doesn’t matter. In the grand scheme of things . . .” Phoebe waited for Jeanne. Then she said, “What is it?” Oh, who can remember, Jeanne thought. Maybe she was sleeping. It was hard to tell. She could have been dreaming, or talking in her sleep. “You played well, but other people play much better.” “Thanks, Grandma,” Phoebe said, and suddenly Jeanne saw her as a little child, golden-haired, sitting on the beach. She could see Phoebe sand-dusted in her bathing suit. The rippling tide around her, deep-blue waves, white foam. Jeanne lost consciousness the next day. Dan and Steve kissed their mother’s forehead. Once more, everybody said goodbye, but another day passed, and then a third. Finally, at night, when she was all alone except for Shawn, Jeanne cried out. “Mrs. Rubinstein!” He tried to make her comfortable, but she fought him. She didn’t want help. She wanted to open her eyes, to rise up from her bed. She wanted music and she wanted apples. She wanted to touch the sandy beach, to feel summer’s heat. She wanted all this, but she couldn’t have it. She died because she couldn’t breathe. In the morning, Jeanne’s sons tried to make arrangements. Everybody sat in the dining room, and Helen insisted that her rabbi lead prayers. Sylvia turned on her. “She said no memorial service. You know she hated organized religion!” “Stop shrieking at me,” Helen said. “We are honoring Jeanne’s life, not yours.” Dan intervened. “A simple burial.” “No service,” Steve added. “But she didn’t want a burial,” Sylvia reminded them. Helen drew herself up. “She said fine.” “Because you pressured her!” “I would never pressure anyone,” Helen said. “Oh, really!” “She told me fine.” “Nobody else heard her.” “The rabbi heard.” “Because the two of you were pressuring her into it.” “For the last time, she wasn’t pressured. She said yes. Bury me.” “Because she was dying! That’s why she agreed.” Even as they argued in the dining room, the rental company came to collect Jeanne’s cannisters of oxygen. Someone was on the phone about the hospital bed, now stripped bare. “She wanted to be scattered,” Sylvia declared. “She said, Bury me. She told the rabbi.” “She didn’t believe in rabbis!” “Does that mean he never existed?” Helen shot back. “Does that mean the conversation never happened?” “Stop,” Dan begged them, but they would not stop. “As far as you’re concerned,” Sylvia said, “the only conversations that happen are the ones happening to you.” Now Helen lost her temper entirely. “I asked her to make plans, and you accused me of having no feelings! I talked about instructions, because I knew this was going to happen!” “She stated her wishes a thousand times.” Sylvia spoke with resolve. “She said she wanted to be scattered.” “That is what she said,” Dan admitted. “She never wavered,” Sylvia told Helen. “She changed her mind!” Helen cried out, but no one believed her. Once, Helen had been the sane one. Now they treated her as though she were delusional. Sylvia had begun the insurrection. She’d waged this war for weeks. Helen’s voice broke, even as she appealed to them all. “Jeanne talked to the rabbi and she said, Bury me, and that’s the truth!” Sylvia fixed her eyes on Helen. “Don’t get hysterical.” But of course it wasn’t up to them. Dan and Steve made all the plans. They interpreted their mother’s wishes. There would be no burial, just a celebration of Jeanne’s life. Privately, their wives spoke to Sylvia and Helen. They said that the reception after the service would be catered, and for the sake of the family they requested no homemade desserts. They asked Jeanne’s sisters to promise. No cookies, no pecan bars. Absolutely no cake. “I will do whatever you decide,” Helen said with dignity. “And so will I,” Sylvia said. Helen added, “I would never use an occasion like this to call attention to myself.” No rabbi spoke at the celebration of Jeanne’s life. Jeanne’s student Emma Kantor played Bach, and Dan spoke about how Jeanne’s music had filled the house. Steve talked about what he had learned from his mother: “Don’t quit. Don’t feel sorry for yourself. Don’t just stand there, do something.” These were the lessons he remembered, although Jeanne’s actual words had been “Don’t pace.” In the front row of the funeral chapel, Sylvia sat wearing tinted glasses. She didn’t think that she could speak. However, when the time came she walked up to the lectern and the words began to come. She’d written them all down on college-ruled paper. “All my friends were jealous when she was born,” Sylvia said. “But I didn’t even let them touch her. She was a perfect baby and an angel. From the time she was born, she was my special charge. I used to dress her and play with her. I was her teacher when we played school on the porch. And this is why . . . this is why it’s so difficult . . . impossible to . . .” Sylvia broke down, and her son rushed to the lectern to comfort her, which made her cry even more. How could he keep smoking after all this? How could his wife, his college sweetheart, leave him? Lew was standing. He helped her take her seat, and she sat between the two of them, her husband and her son, and the tears kept coming—until Helen began to speak. “It is perhaps appropriate that I speak last, because I am the oldest,” Helen said. “And yet I have no monopoly on my sister. Like every human, she belonged to many people, not just one. She had parents.” Helen stared straight at Sylvia. “She had two older sisters. She was a beloved member of our family. Daughter, sister, mother, cousin, friend. She was a musician. She was a teacher who spent countless hours instructing children. She was not sentimental, but she was giving.” Now Sylvia took off her glasses. Now she wiped the last tears from her eyes. “She did not love tradition,” Helen said, “but in her final days she spoke of God.” “Not true!” Sylvia whispered to Lew. “She talked about belief.” Louder, Sylvia whispered to her husband, “That’s just not true!” As Helen spoke, Sylvia rattled her notes, her own words left unsaid. She wanted to stand up and finish her eulogy. She wanted to deliver her bright version of Jeanne’s life, the true picture, unvarnished with religion, but it was too late. Already Helen was speaking about eternity. Already she was reciting Kaddish. Sylvia wanted to cry out and stop the prayer. She whispered loud enough for those around her to hear, “This is not what Jeanne wanted!” Apart from that, she suffered in silence. She would not ruin the memorial. She would never make a scene. To close the service, Jeanne’s twelve-year-old student, George Leong, played the Meditation on a Theme from “Thaïs.” He didn’t rush until the last cascading phrases at the end. Horse knows the way, Jeanne would have said. After the celebration, the family convened at Jeanne’s house to sit shivah for one day. No one could take off another week. Silent, staring, Helen watched the caterers serve quiche and crudités and sweet noodle kugel in a silver chafing dish. Fresh-fruit platters stood in for dessert, along with factory-made cookies and weak coffee. In the living room, Melanie and Andrea tried to comfort friends and neighbors who were shaken by Jeanne’s passing. Several confided that Jeanne’s sudden death had prompted them to enjoy life while they could. The Auerbachs next door had decided to tour the Galápagos Islands. After that, they hoped to see the northern lights. They had a list. In Jeanne’s studio, Dan and Steve and their cousins, Pam, Wendy, and Richard, talked about how they used to play Wiffle ball together in the back yard. Someone asked Helen to look for the photo albums, but she sat in a daze. As for Sylvia, she was nowhere to be seen. Late in the day, just as the guests began to leave, Sylvia slipped into the house. Sober, Lew followed, carrying a tube pan. “Lew?” Andrea said in a warning voice. “What is that?” Lew kept moving. He knew that this was the nuclear option, and he felt culpable, but he loved his wife. In the dining room, Sylvia sliced her fresh-baked apple cake. The caterers were still packing up. Their chafing dishes were hardly cold when the house filled with the cake’s fragrance. Jeanne’s grandsons ran straight to the table. Christian appeared with Phoebe right behind him. The scent of apples woke Helen from her trance. She marched into the dining room and saw the family eating; she saw what Sylvia had done, and her eyes brightened; her whole body tensed with indignation. That was the end. Melanie tried. Everybody tried. Nobody could reconcile Jeanne’s sisters. This was all a misunderstanding, their children said. Don’t be stubborn, their children pleaded. Andrea said that they only had each other now, but they refused to listen. Dan said life was short. They didn’t care. In fact, they knew it wasn’t true. Their lives were long. Lorraine was right. Everybody mourned in his or her own way. Phoebe wrote a poem, and Melanie did in fact start taking antidepressants. Richard began dating a woman he’d met at a bar. Pam adopted a shelter dog. As for Jeanne’s sisters, they would not forgive each other for Jeanne’s death. They would not reconcile, not even when the whole family gathered at Singing Beach in the spring to scatter Jeanne’s ashes in the ocean. Wendy stood on the sand and asked the sisters, in Jeanne’s memory, to open their hearts and to embrace each other so that they might begin to heal, but no, not even then.

“But it’s tawdry,” the woman said. “Petty. I still can’t figure out what happened. . . .” She was tall, pale, and had dark hair and a heart-shaped face. She looked to be in her early thirties. “I made a series of mistakes,” she said, “due to being hasty, or influenced by who knows? And each led to the next, and they seem to have ruined this man’s life—my ex-boyfriend’s—or else changed it completely. And the initial mistake was that, when I moved from Manhattan to a bleak town upstate, I took a house sight unseen.” “That doesn’t sound so bad,” someone said. “Yes,” a man, a novelist, said, and nodded. “If you didn’t like it when you got there, you could have just switched houses.” “But I didn’t,” the woman said. “I didn’t realize the truth about the house until too late, and then I stayed. I was too lazy to move, or else sick in the head.” The woman sat down at the table. It was the first time she had that evening. Rain smashed sideways against the bungalow’s steel siding. The rain had begun halfway through dinner. Then thin straws of lightning appeared beyond the dark windows, and hail fell on the tin roof. The woman had served jumbo shrimp sautéed in garlic butter; chicken quesadillas with goat Cheddar cheese; refried black beans, sautéed onions and peppers; a pear-and-bitter-greens salad; and flourless chocolate cake with raspberry-vodka sauce. Everyone had drunk Lone Star beer. Her guests were a Korean-American crime-noir novelist, a Lebanese fantasy writer, a Thai journalist, and three Brazilian painters. None of the seven people around the table knew one another well; they’d all been flown to this mountain town on the Mexican border by a foundation that was putting them up and paying them to practice their respective arts for six weeks. They were all unsuccessful, middle-aged, and hard up for cash. None of them knew who’d selected them for the residency, or why. The woman had agreed to host a dinner, because her bungalow was the largest. Three of the group were divorced; four never married. Over dinner, they’d discussed politics and failed relationships, then moved on to ghost stories. The guests were full, tipsy, and reluctant to go out into the rain. They’d heard about the boot steps on the stairs of the old Virginia fort, and the Northern California gold-rush-era hotel where female guests woke with hand-shaped bruises around their necks. A ghost story about a man’s life getting ruined seemed better. They leaned forward. The novelist opened a bottle of wine and poured it into glasses. “Tawdry,” he said. “I like it.” The woman spread her hands. “The mistakes were trivial.” “It’s always like that,” a painter said. He smiled. “Everything on earth is trivial. Also tawdry.” “You think you ruined a man’s life,” the novelist said. “But all women think that.” A few people laughed. “Maybe I didn’t,” the woman said. “That would make me happy.” “Tell us and we’ll judge.” She sipped her wine. “The year I met this man, I was twenty-five and lived in New York City, where I’d moved to become a writer. But no journal responded to the stories I mailed them—I knew myself they were no good—and I spent all my time tutoring and proctoring exams for a test-prep company. Most days, I taught at the test-prep center; others I travelled to Riverdale or White Plains to sit in grand dining rooms with people my own age and show them how to combine tricky if-then statements so as to improve their scores on the law- and business-school entrance exams. The students’ parents paid the company exorbitant sums, but my checks were so small I barely made rent. I had three dollars a day for food; every day I bought a bagel and a small carton of milk to go in my oatmeal. When I was accepted to a Master of Fine Arts program in Syracuse, I was thrilled, even though I was rejected from the fiction track and accepted only for poetry, and even though the city was a frigid, depressed backwater, because the program offered me a fellowship with a stipend. “When time came to secure housing, I was too broke to make the trip to Syracuse, so I called the program secretary and asked if she knew of any apartments. She demurred, but called back the next day: a student was vacating an apartment. Several others had lived there before him, and had also broken the lease; she didn’t know why. It was cheap, and close to campus. The apartment was a two-bedroom for four hundred and thirty-five dollars a month; how could I go wrong? “Here comes the tawdry part of the story. I couldn’t afford a U-Haul. I didn’t know how I’d manage the move—but at the last minute my father called me. He’d recently bought a trailer. He offered to drive with my mother from Maine, where they lived, to Manhattan with the trailer hitched to their station wagon, and pick me up on a Friday morning in August; if we left early, he said, we’d beat weekend traffic. They’d have me in Syracuse by 2 P.M., and they could drive the eight hours from Syracuse back to Maine that same day. My father guessed, he said gruffly, that I was broke. He was embarrassed to offer this help; he guessed that, since I had some pride, I’d refuse. “My parents and I were not close. They were typical New England parents; they showed my sister and me little affection, and we showed them little back. My father always told me that if I accepted any assistance from him after he’d paid for college I’d be a loser. My mother was a housewife who believed that all non-Catholics and women who had premarital sex would burn in agonizing flames forever after death. As a kid, I wished I felt a sense of kinship with my parents, but I never did. Like many people, I suppose, I fantasized that I’d discover I was adopted, and had ‘real’ parents somewhere far away who were intelligent, well-read, sophisticated, and cared about improving the world. But because I resembled my parents physically—my father’s eyebrows, my mother’s round face, their pink skin—I knew I was not adopted. “I’m an ingrate, I know, but my parents’ control of my sister’s and my bodies and movements, when we were kids—over the organization of the clothes in our closets; the minute of our return, should we go out to see a movie—was so total that after I left home the idea of their entering any space of mine was repulsive. They left a scent behind them. Maybe all parents do. It didn’t help that my mother had a habit of ‘fixing’ whatever room she entered—rearranging pillows on beds, dusting windowsills, and finding hidden spots of mold—and my father of ‘checking’: he opened cupboards and desk drawers when he thought no one was looking, and he always peeked under loose couch cushions for lost change. So I didn’t want to accept my parents’ help. But my father had said that they’d drop me off in Syracuse and leave immediately, and so I slyly felt that I’d get something for nothing. “My father warned me that I must have my boxes on the sidewalk in front of my apartment by 9 A.M. that Friday. He didn’t want to spend money on a hotel, or stay overnight in Syracuse. Of course, I swore I’d be ready at nine. But I managed to fuck things up. I’d been dating a handsome black banker-by-day who did standup at night—one of several handsome black men I’d dated that summer—and when he suggested we have dinner on the eve of my departure I agreed, because I suspected romantic pickings would be slim in Syracuse; besides, I enjoyed his company. After dinner, we went to a bar with an outdoor patio and had drinks; the time when I should have gone home to pack came and went. I thought, Ah, how important is packing? I can stuff things in boxes between 1 and 3 A.M.! We had such fun that the banker suggested we continue to date once I was in Syracuse; he could drive up, he said, and I could bus down to see him. But I was intoxicated, also caddish, and replied, ‘That’s silly—it’s too far to drive.’ “His face flushed. He had full cheeks; he looked down at his tie; I guessed I’d offended him. To apologize, I added, ‘You’ll have girlfriends here, and I’ll be busy with coursework and people I meet in Syracuse.’ He flushed deeper. A drink later, I asked if he’d come up to my place; I loved his humor, and thought it would be nice to have one last roll with him. It’d be quick, I figured, and I could pack once he’d left. When we reached my tiny fourth-floor studio and started making out on my moldy old futon, he asked, out of nowhere, if I’d ever slept with other black men; I said I had; we were already undressed; he said, half comic, half angry, ‘You like black cock?’ I hesitated. To me, the question seemed odd, since it was evident that I did. Who, I wondered, wouldn’t like such a good thing?” The woman looked around the table. The rain was still beating against the tin roof. A painter got up and poured wine. The journalist took a bite of chocolate cake. He said, “This relates to the ghost story?” She nodded. “Yes.” He waved his arm. “Then go on.” “In retrospect,” the woman said, “I should have said something sensitive, like, ‘I like your black cock,’ or ‘I like you,’ but I just nodded. He said, ‘Say it,’ and so I said, ‘I like black cock,’ and he proceeded to love me so vehemently that afterward I fell asleep without setting my alarm or peeing, as all women must after sex. “When I woke, it was nine and my parents were waiting; my father was irate. He asked why I wasn’t ready, and I told him I’d overslept; he swore and hit the trailer. My mother made him sit in the car with her while my pale, skinny sister helped me pack and carry boxes down the stairs. On the road, my father sped. The day was sunny, and, once we were out of the city, hay fields stretched beyond the highway. It looked as if we might still beat the weekend traffic. My father even turned on his radio station that played the Beach Boys, and hummed. My mother watched pine trees pass by, read her study-group Bible, and chewed chocolate truffles; my sister read a fantasy novel. “Eventually, my mother touched my father’s thigh. She murmured, ‘We’ll get home tonight, don’t worry.’ “Just then, I felt a horrible pain in my crotch. Or, more precisely, in my urinary tract. I knew why I had it. I also knew that my parents would know, and how angry they’d be. As subtly as possible, I stuffed my fist in my crotch. I held my book in my lap. But the pain got worse. After an hour, I tapped my mother’s shoulder, and whispered that I needed a clinic. I begged her not to say why. “She stared at me; her eyes narrowed. “My father asked what was wrong; my mother announced that I had a U.T.I. My father cursed and said we couldn’t stop, or we’d never make Syracuse in time. My sister, who was thirteen, asked what a U.T.I. was. “My mother, her lips curled in disgust, informed her that a U.T.I. was a disease that married women got; my sister remarked that I wasn’t married; no one replied. “In the next town we found a clinic, but there was a line; getting medicine took three hours. When I returned to the car, no one spoke. We pulled onto the highway, and hit traffic. It was dusk when the hills of Syracuse came into view. “On the street that was to be mine, rusted filing cabinets sat in overgrown yards. My address was a tall, narrow Victorian with a second-level porch that tilted downward as if it might fall off; the house was deep, Pepto-Bismol pink. “The front door was locked. But I spied a rickety wooden staircase in back, so I walked up the driveway and climbed it; the second-story back door opened to a dusty kitchen. Dirty mops and old buckets littered the floor. In the bathroom, nails and asbestos poked through the exposed attic roof beams. A claw-footed tub stood mid-room; its bottom was stained a radiant orange-green. The toilet sat below a rusty old-fashioned standing tank that almost reached the ceiling. “Sorry, but I’m cheating on my diet and I don’t like loose ends.”Buy the print » “On my return to the car, I passed two black boys tossing a football in my neighbor’s driveway and, seated in a lawn chair nearby, a middle-aged man with an unusual look. He had a normal, if markedly masculine, body: dark chest hair burst out of the top of his blue-checkered button-down shirt. What was unusual was his large egg-shaped head and a forehead that encompassed nearly half his oddly appealing face. He had almond-shaped brown eyes, olive skin, wide cheeks, and fierce eyebrows. He frowned slightly as he wrote in the book—a thick manuscript—in his lap. As I passed him, he looked up. His hand raised in a small wave. I said hello, without intending to chat, but once I’d spoken the man greeted me and said, ‘So you’re the new girl.’ “I nodded. “His long legs stretched in front of the old chair. His khaki pants were wrinkled, his leather shoes scuffed. He gestured toward the car. “ ‘Them, too?’ “I explained that my family was helping me move, and leaving that night. “ ‘So it’s just you,’ he said. ‘Good.’ “When I asked him whether he lived in the adjacent house, he shrugged and gestured toward the kids. “ ‘Tom takes people in,’ he said. “I decided that meant he was homeless. “I’d just said, ‘Nice to meet you,’ and started moving toward my parents’ wagon when he pointed at my house and said, lightly, ‘You know, that house is haunted.’ “Once he said it, it made sense—I’m not one to believe in ghosts, and, as far as I knew, I had never seen one; but the apartment felt stuffy. If it was haunted, though, I didn’t care. What unsettled me was the man’s intimate demeanor and offerings about the house I hadn’t inhabited yet. “ ‘Oh, really?’ I said. “ ‘Don’t worry.’ His hand moved across the manuscript. ‘He can’t do anything to you unless you give him permission.’ “ ‘What do you mean, “give him permission”?’ I asked. “The man shrugged. The evening breeze blew his curly dark hair. My father honked the car horn. “The man looked down at his papers with embarrassment. ‘Oh, you know,’ he said. ‘Summon him with a Ouija board, ask him to tell you secrets, take his stuff. That’s true with any ghost. They can never affect you unless you address them and invite them to appear.’ He smiled disarmingly. “I thanked him for the advice. He remained there, reading his manuscript, while my family and I carried boxes into the house. My parents seemed not to see him. At one point, a middle-aged black man opened the back door of the neighboring house, peered across the driveway, ignored the man, and told the kids to come inside. Only my little sister noticed the man. She looked at him once, jerked her head down—she had a tic—and asked who he was; I told her that he was a vagrant. “My sister said, ‘Weird neighborhood.’ “My father reassembled my futon while my sister and I carried in boxes, and I was feeling pleased that my parents were helping me move in but curious why they weren’t hurrying home, when my father announced that we should get food. My mother said they weren’t staying: the apartment was disgusting, and I had only one bed; she wanted a hotel. My father replied, No way in hell was he spending money when he’d driven nine hundred miles to save me money; they could use my bed. “I knew they could afford a hotel, because my mother collected designer clothes and bought herself ruby and emerald bracelets on a regular basis. I felt humiliated that I had the U.T.I.; I wanted to be alone. Mostly, I did not want them to sleep in my house—for their presence in it to infect my new life in Syracuse, however absurd that sounds. I wanted them to leave. I almost offered to pay for a hotel. But I knew how ungrateful my feelings were—undaughterly and unnatural. They’d done me a favor. Of course they could have my bed, I said. “We drove to get takeout Chinese, then brought it back and ate it straight from the cartons, in silence, while sitting on the living-room floor. “Eventually, I spoke. Perhaps I couldn’t take the silence. “I said casually, ‘The house has a ghost.’ “My sister pushed a carton of greasy noodles toward the center of the room. “My father put a piece of broccoli in his mouth, then a piece of long red beef, and chewed. He stared at me. “My mother gazed at the windowsills. On one were three dead flies.“ ‘There’s no such thing as ghosts,’ she said. ‘Except for the Holy Ghost, who lives with God and is part of him. Once we die on earth, we’re done here. After people die, they go to Heaven to be with God. Unless they go to’—she looked at me—‘Hell.’ “My father pulled my sister’s lo mein toward him, stabbed a chicken gristle-blob with his fork, and ate it. “ ‘This Chinese food is delicious!’ he yelled. ‘I bet the ghost would like some! Rachel, what do you think?’ “My sister stared at him. Our father was a duplicitous, lascivious, agnostic Yankee skinflint who could go from jovial to enraged in a second. He liked to joke. “I felt nervous and repeated the man’s superstition—the ghost couldn’t affect us unless we invited it to appear. “My father held out both hands palms up. ‘In that case,’ he yelled, ‘I invite the ghost to have his way with whoever he finds in the house!’ He lowered his voice. ‘I can speak generously because I’m pretty sure the ghost will choose one of my young attractive daughters.’ “My mother wailed my father’s name. My sister looked at the floor. “ ‘Or my attractive wife,’ he added. “He hummed ‘Runaround Sue.’ “I arranged the futon for my parents, made a blanket-bed on the dining-room floor for my sister, and slept on the floor myself, using a sweatshirt as a pillow. I felt bad that my sister had come on this journey and learned what a U.T.I. was. Through the night, a breeze moved the bedroom door, which my parents had left ajar, back and forth, and the creaking woke me; several times I dreamed that a man, my father, left the bedroom and stood, half menacingly, half perplexedly, over my sister’s form. I thought, Please don’t let it take her; if it has to take anyone, let it take me. She hasn’t done anything; let it leave her alone. It seemed as if I’d just thought this when I woke. Everyone else was up. “While I slept, my mother had scrubbed and mopped the entire flat. It was ‘filthy,’ she said, ‘disgusting.’ Before they left, my father handed me two quarters, which he’d discovered in a bedroom closet, and a man’s ring, which he happened to find atop the old toilet tank. ‘Pretty grody up there,’ he said. “The ring was large and had a blue-green stone shaped like an elephant, outlined in silver. Trunk and tail were tucked; the torso was an octagon. My mother said the stone was a Paraiba tourmaline, nice but occluded. A shame, she said; it weighed at least thirty carats. She showed me a dark blot in the elephant’s torso and said, ‘Flawed.’ I dropped the ring onto the necklace I always wore, a simple chain with some charms—a rose quartz, a silver goat head—and forgot about it. “I settled into Syracuse. Because of precipitation from the Great Lakes, snow arrived in September and stayed through May. I learned that its population declined in the seventies and eighties, when General Electric moved west, and that, owing to industrial contamination, its lake, Onondaga, was among the most polluted in the world. Personally, I thrived: I started classes, ran in the local park, and read copious books, especially the absurd dead Russian writers. “One night, soon after moving into the house, I put on tight pants, a top that showed my midriff, and a thin leather jacket, and went to the neighborhood bar, Taps. Once there, I did something uncharacteristic: I picked out a man I normally wouldn’t have chosen.” The woman rose and put plates in the sink. “For some reason,” she said, “I’m not attracted to men who are Christian or ‘white.’ Perhaps it’s self-loathing.” The rain poured down. The fantasy writer sipped his wine. “I’ll take a piece of chocolate torte,” he said. “But one without raspberries.” She flicked the raspberries off a slice and served it to him. “The bar was a former funeral parlor, long and dark, with no windows. But it had pool tables, cheap drinks, and free popcorn. It was owned by a Greek family who had lived in town a long time. Locals liked it, and graduate students went there to shoot pool and discuss literature. The man—I’ll call him Paul—was a year ahead of me, the program’s best writer. He already had a literary agent; his professors predicted that he’d be famous. “I heard this before we met, from other students; also that he was engaged. “I introduced myself to Paul. When he asked where I’d moved from, I said Manhattan. He appraised my outfit and said that I wouldn’t like Syracuse. When I asked why, he said I was a ‘sophisticated city type.’ “I told him I’d grown up in Maine, bought the jacket at an outlet. “ ‘But you wear jewels,’ he said, and pointed to the ring on the chain around my neck. “I laughed and said it was flawed. “He plucked it from my shirt and mock-examined it; said he didn’t see any flaws. “When I looked at him, I was repulsed. I feel like a traitor, even now, saying this. Others found him handsome, but I was repulsed. He had silky blond hair, green eyes, a cherubic face, and rosy skin. Usually, I don’t feel comfortable around pink-skinned Christian men; they seem porcine, stupid, and swollen. I like tall, dark, big men; Paul was five feet eight and skinny. Yet I was drawn to him. He made me feel as if we shared a secret and he’d never judge me for anything. He’d boxed in college, but was so gentle, I’d later learn, that when he found a spider in a house he carried it outside. His mother had multiple sclerosis and was in love with him. She tied pink ribbons around her slender waist whenever he visited, and repeatedly told him that he was the kind of boy she wished she’d met at his age. He wrote by hand, in cursive sentences that wound on for pages, riffs that ‘rolled like music,’ our teachers said, and loved gerunds. His fiancée had lupus and lived in Virginia, where he was from, because of her job. “That night, we played pool. Afterward, I invited him to my flat to play chess.” The woman paused. “I have morals. But they’re my own. If I make a promise, I keep it. If someone else breaks promises, that’s their business. “What I regret is that I spent six years with a man I wasn’t physically attracted to. I’m not sure why, or why”—the woman shrugged—“he liked me. It was cold in Syracuse. The program was small. He was smart and kind. Even after smoking twelve joints, he told charming anecdotes. After we’d dated awhile, he called off his engagement. “I went to lengths to please him. He liked my apartment, but said my living room needed a couch; I got a tutoring job and bought a couch. He said my living room needed a TV; I bought a twenty-five-inch tube with a built-in VHS player. At yard sales, I scored coffee tables and lamps. Soon Paul was spending most of his time at my apartment. I’d always preferred solitude, but his presence made me happy. And he taught me how to write. In our first year together, he produced stories our teachers called masterpieces, and under his tutelage my writing improved so much that I was allowed to switch to the fiction track. We discussed our writing and our childhoods, dreams, and plans. I felt that I could be myself around him. He loved my cooking—he didn’t know that I had bought a tin of MSG at Price Chopper, and stirred tablespoons into my curries before I served them. “One night toward the end of my first year at Syracuse, Paul stayed home to work, and I wrote until late. I felt so content—in my work and life—that I slept with the lights off. “Usually, I leave the lights on when I sleep. It’s ridiculous, but I’m afraid of the dark, if I’m alone. “That night, I turned them off. I fell asleep with the bedroom door ajar. At 3 A.M., I woke. The room was dark. But I could see the outline of my bureau, and, in the light from the window, the outline of the bedroom door. Then the doorknob moved. “Nothing moved outside the door. But its knob turned back and forth. I could see the knob turning. It jerked all the way left, clicked, then turned right. “I was terrified. I lay rigid, watching the knob turn for several minutes, until it stopped. Then I flicked the lights on and called Paul. Almost every night after that, he stayed at my house. When he didn’t, I left the lights on. “Weeks later, a student who’d lived in the apartment before me told Paul why he’d left. He’d been lying in bed late at night, in the room now my bedroom, and the knob of the door—which he’d closed fully—had turned suddenly, and continued to twist. The student, a self-proclaimed goatfucker from Nevada, leaped out of bed, took his nunchakus out of his underwear drawer, brandished it, and yelled, ‘Whaddya want, Motherfucker?’ Buy the print » “O.K., I thought. A ghost who turns doorknobs. So what? I wasn’t thrilled to live in a haunted apartment. But it was big and cheap, and I’d had a good time there so far. “One odd thing happened my second year in the program. I was at Taps, chatting with the owner’s son, the bartender—a Greek tough, mid-thirties, gold chains, hairy chest—when he pointed to the ring on my necklace and asked where I’d got it. “When I explained, the bartender asked where I lived. Then he asked to see the ring, and examined it. A guy had died in my apartment, he said. The ring was his. “The bartender had been a kid when the guy died, he said. He, the bartender, had hung out at the bar a lot, done his homework there, helped his dad, and he’d liked the ring because it was an elephant, and the guy, a regular, had let him play with it. The guy was no one special, the bartender said. He’d come from the Midwest to help with construction at the power plant. The guy was a self-taught type: he welded, built furniture, made the ring himself. Sat at the bar every night, drinking seltzer and reading physics textbooks. The guy died, the bartender said, because there was an accident at the plant. Some workers were exposed to too much radiation. One thing that made the guy weird, the bartender said: he’d refused treatment. The ‘treatment’ was a crock—the guys who accepted it all died anyway, but in the hospital. This guy died in his apartment, while taking a bath. “The bartender gave me the ring back, wrung out his rag, and said I shouldn’t wear it. “When I asked why not, he blushed. He said that it was probably just superstition, but in Greek culture they believed the dead were attached to objects they’d interacted with, and that when you wore their things you attracted their spirit. “He walked to the end of the bar. Added, ‘Plus, you look stupid wearing a man’s ring.’ “So I stuck the ring in a drawer and forgot about it. “I didn’t think about Syracuse much. I was busy taking classes, reading books. The economy was depressed—in the square, boutiques stood empty. But people still came down from Canada to go to the mall. The park nearby had a lot of rapes in it, but only at night. It was pretty, and had a rose garden. “I sometimes saw the homeless guy, who I assumed lived with my neighbor—he was always wearing the same khaki pants and blue checkered shirt, sitting in the lawn chair reading papers or tomes—but he spoke to me only once after the day I moved in. He’d been sweeping the neighbor’s driveway. I might have been staring at him, because the hair on his big head was so wild and curly, and he looked funny pushing a broom in khakis. Possibly I was lonely. When he saw me watching him, he smiled and said, ‘How’s the writing?’ “I said, ‘Fine.’ “He said, ‘Good.’ “He indicated the broom: ‘Doing a little yard work. Tom expects everyone who hangs around to pitch in.’ “I didn’t think sweeping a blacktop was work, but I nodded. “The guy pushed the broom brusquely. Dust flew into the air. Then he walked over, asked where I was from, where I went jogging, what books I liked. Eventually, he offered, ‘I’ve been working on my manuscript.’ “ ‘That’s good,’ I mumbled. “ ‘It’s about my life,’ he said. “I said I bet it was interesting. I guessed it was about hopping trains, carrying food sacks on sticks, whatever hobo stuff hobos did. “ ‘Well, I don’t know about that,’ he said. ‘But I’ve had interesting jobs.’ “I nodded, asked where he was from. “ ‘Nebraska,’ he said. “I had little interest in the Midwest, which I thought of as a wasteland of flat-faced, goiter-ridden white people. He didn’t look like a Midwesterner, not with his olive skin and nearly black hair. He’d folded his muscular arms across his chest, and was peering inscrutably at my apartment’s porch. He was standing quite close to me, I realized. “He said, ‘You ever been?’ “I shook my head. “ ‘It’s beautiful,’ he said. Then he added that his fiancée, the best girl in the world, was there, and that he was returning soon. “I felt irrationally peeved and blurted out, ‘If you really like her, why are you here and she’s there?’ “He looked down at his scuffed shoes, and his cheeks reddened. He explained that there were things he ‘had to do’ in Syracuse, but that he was going back once he finished his work. He hoped she’d wait for him. He smiled at me and said, ‘Do you think time and space matter?’ “I wasn’t sure what to say, it seemed such a stupid question. “ ‘Yes,’ I said. “He smiled. ‘Then maybe they do,’ he said gently. ‘For you.’ “He pulled a photograph from his pocket. It was color, but so faded that I couldn’t see an image—just a form. “I said she was pretty. “For lack of better topics, and because I’m interested in these things—how people develop emotions and make the absurd decision to spend their whole life with one probably actually disgusting and not very intelligent person—I asked how they’d met, and he told me that she was a freshman in high school when he was a senior, and that she’d been dating his younger brother. His eyebrows lifted. ‘You can’t tell by looking at me,’ he said. ‘But my brother has blond hair and blue eyes. I’m the dark one in my family.’ He frowned. He’d had to do a lot of work to get his fiancée away from his brother, he said, because she’d found his brother incredibly handsome. When I asked what he’d done, he said, ‘Oh, just the usual: took her out a lot, invented surprise-adventure treats, and told her a lot of bad jokes. Persistence.’ “He peered off into the woods behind my house. “That was the last time I saw him. “When Paul graduated from the program, he said he might move to D.C. and work as a reporter. I was devastated, because I’d imagined he would stay in Syracuse. When I suggested it, he looked away. He said since I didn’t plan to be with him long-term there was no reason for him to stay. “I’d told him frankly, when it came up, that I had no interest in marrying him. I had no interest in marriage at all. I suppose that, like many people, I lacked a good model. Marriage seemed a bad deal: the man cheated, and the woman got fat. Also, I’d never met anyone I liked enough to want to marry; also, I wasn’t attracted to Paul. “I knew I was selfish to want him to stay, just to help me with my work. But whenever I wrote a story he knew whether it was good or bad, and, when it was bad, he told me exactly how to fix it. Also, I’d never had the kind of friendship and support I got from him. “We stood in my dining room. He asked me, point blank, if I wanted to be with him long-term. I knew that if I said ‘No,’ or ‘Not sure,’ he’d leave. “I hesitated. “He turned away. “I panicked. “ ‘Wait,’ I said. “My mother was cold, but whenever she wanted someone to do something for her she gave gifts. “Paul waited. “I went into my bedroom and grabbed the tourmaline. The stone sparkled. I had some jewellers’ boxes, and I slipped the ring in one. I brought the box to Paul and held it out. “I said that I’d been meaning to give it to him, as a symbol of my fondness for him, and that I hoped he’d stay. “He seemed impressed. He put it on. He said he’d stay. “I suggested we get a nicer apartment. But Paul decided that he liked my flat. So he moved into the pink house. “Paul quit smoking weed. He swore off Taps and spent days in the second bedroom—now his office—but his novel never progressed. He had taken a position working in the warehouse at the air-conditioner factory in town, and he complained that it took all his energy. But he also stayed up every night until 4 A.M. watching movies, and each morning when I opened the freezer I found that a large carton of Breyer’s ice cream that had been full the night before was now half empty. We went on walks together during which he didn’t speak, or else ranted about the crooked Republican government. When his mother called, he didn’t pick up. I guessed that his pot-smoking habit had masked depression; or that living with me depressed him; or that depression was the inevitable result of living in Syracuse. “He claimed he was ‘fine’; but sometimes he said his head hurt, and that he couldn’t concentrate; however, this seemed natural for a writer. We seldom had sex; but that was natural, I guessed, for a couple who’d moved in together. “I’d thought Paul and I were similar—agnostic, liberal. But one afternoon, a few months after moving in, he asked how many men I’d slept with in my life. I trusted him, so I gave an honest answer. That is, an honest estimate. He’d never said he thought having sex was immoral, so I was shocked by his response: he wiped his brow and said, ‘Really?’ Then his eyes glistened. I was concerned. It was his birthday, and we’d invited friends over for the evening. I’d baked a cake, and guests were about to arrive. “I asked what was wrong. ‘Are you O.K.?’ I said, and tried to hug him. “Abruptly, he said he had to go buy beer for our guests. I said I’d bought beer; he answered that I hadn’t bought enough. When our guests arrived, Paul hadn’t returned. Eventually, someone reported that he was at the bar, on a bender. “I forgave him for that night, or he me—but I felt betrayed. I’d seldom experienced such revulsion directed my way, and I felt vulnerable, as I had when I was a child. I saw him now as I had initially—his face and body so viscerally pink, like underdone pork loin. “When I stopped sleeping with him, he didn’t seem to care. I thought he’d cheat on me, but he left the house now only to work at the factory. “I thought he’d leave. But he didn’t. I’d published some stories in national magazines—almost entirely because of his encouragement, plot ideas, edits, and, often, insertions of missing paragraphs—and Paul soon informed me excitedly that I was now eligible to apply for tenure-track teaching jobs. I must apply, he said. If he could, he would. It was an honor, the chance of a lifetime. “All year, Paul had worked and paid our rent. Because of this, he said, he’d been unable to write. If I got a tenure-track job, I thought, I could support us, and Paul could finish his novel. So I applied for jobs. Paul organized the whole thing, printing out the list from the M.L.A. Web site, highlighting ads I qualified for, and circling the best positions. “To please him, I applied to schools in Ohio, Utah, Iowa, and even Minnesota. But not Nebraska—I wouldn’t go there, I said. “ ‘But it’s the best job,’ he said. The teaching load was low, the salary high. So I applied. “Ultimately, I got several offers, but the job in Nebraska was the best. “When the time to move came, we hadn’t slept together in a year. I told Paul we should break up. To my surprise, he asked me to give him another chance. He’d change in Nebraska, he said. “In the end, I acceded, because I was afraid to move to Nebraska by myself. Even if he’d become unfamiliar—morose, silent, unable to read—he was familiar—his scent, body, posture, gestures, voice. He was my friend. “But in Nebraska we grew further apart. Paul loved the friendliness of the people and the fields and trees. I hated the flatness of the Nebraskans’ faces and of the terrain. He’d studied the town’s layout before we moved, scoured rental ads, and chosen a stone ‘worker’s house’ for us that I found ugly and he adored. The university gave him classes to teach, and he loved doing it; I saw teaching as a job. Evenings, we walked along the low, sluggish river that cut through town. The river was brown and smelled of industrial runoff and dead fish. Mosquitoes swarmed along the levee, and as we walked we dripped sweat. Sand islands in the river had signs with skulls on them that read, ‘Toxic, No Fishing,’ and on larger ones old men sat in lawn chairs, rods in the water. I found this tragic. Paul said mildly, ‘People need to eat.’ “He taught his classes, I mine. He worked in his home office, I in mine. We slept in the same bed like brother and sister. Sometimes he offered me a back rub or touched my shoulder in the night, and I rejected him. I’m ashamed now. “Anyone who isn’t specifically named in the will still receives one of these valuable gift bags.”Buy the print » “He stacked neighbors’ wood for fun, swept their driveways. There was one old woman down the block whose lawn he mowed for free, and whose weeds he trimmed. Only now can I see how terrible my attitude was, but I told him that he didn’t need to play grandson to every prairie hag. He reprimanded me calmly, saying he did it because he liked doing it, and wanted to. She wasn’t old, he said; she wasn’t even sixty. “Only once did he seem his former self—he read a book and talked to me about it. It was a true-crime novel. He bought—but failed to read—biographies, histories, pop science. His head hurt too much, he admitted, to read. “I almost never went into his office, because I respected his privacy. But one time I did, and I saw a piece of paper that said ‘KILL YOURSELF’ in black letters, taped to the wall above his desk. When I told him I’d seen the sign and was concerned, he laughed and said it was a joke. ‘Don’t go in my office,’ he said. “He still stayed up watching movies most nights. Once, he told me that he’d written a novel but it was worthless, and he’d thrown it out. I know now that various things cause depression. But, at the time, I was baffled; he seemed so different. “We lived in Nebraska for two years. Once, we had it out. ‘I see the way you look at me,’ he said. He wasn’t stupid. He knew I’d ‘settled.’ Did I ever think maybe he’d settled for me? I was critical, self-righteous, and a jerk. I was no beauty. There hadn’t been many options in Syracuse for him, either, he said. “ ‘You were engaged,’ I said. “He blinked. Flicked his ear as if brushing off a fly. ‘True,’ he said. “I still recall the last time we had sex, because it occurred in an odd way. He touched my shoulder in the night, and, as usual, I rolled away; I don’t want to disgust you with sordid information, but, because it sticks in my memory and is potentially relevant to the story, I have to say. A minute later, I was pushed onto my back and held down; I told him to cut it out, and he ignored me; he was slender, but a boxer, and much stronger than me. It’s going to sound like a terrible romance novel, but he forced me, held me down, looked right at me the whole time, and basically made me want things I didn’t even know I wanted. It was a different style, I guess you could say. Anyway, I was half-horrified and half-exalted afterward, thinking that my whole life had changed, thinking, Maybe this could work, our lives could change, we could be happy, I’ve been such a fool this whole time. I was thinking these things when he said casually, lying apart from me now, ‘That was for him, by the way.’ “I was still catatonic, and unsure what he meant, when he added, ‘Because he still likes you, even though you’re being such a cunt.’ “I lay there for a minute. “I said, ‘It’s not O.K. to call me a cunt.’ “He settled onto his side and looked at me calmly, fully naked, completely unembarrassed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. He added reasonably, ‘It’s also not O.K. to be a cunt.’ “When I said we should separate, his first words were ‘I want the house.’ “He also said, when I asked, that I couldn’t have the ring back. It was tacky of me to ask. He gently pointed that out. “I left Nebraska; he stayed. “I moved to Brooklyn. I heard through acquaintances that he continued to teach, and also got a job at a foundry. For years I thought of him as a failure. A debacle. I don’t know why I judge people this way. He didn’t publish. I saw pictures of him on Facebook with various younger women, possibly students. I was glad he was dating. “After I moved to Brooklyn, I started substitute teaching at private high schools. One needed a gym teacher, and so I became one.” She shrugged. “I realized I liked being a gym teacher. I wasn’t writing. The truth is, without Paul’s help I can’t finish a story. I dated now and then, men I liked well enough, no burning love. It’s only recently—” the woman looked up and brushed her hair behind her ear; her skin was plump, but when she smiled tiny lines appeared under her eyes—“that I fell in love and understood what people mean when they talk about wanting to be with someone forever.” “What happened?” The fantasy writer asked. She shrugged. “I don’t know if he loves me.” The guests fidgeted. “Last fall,” she continued, “I went to Paul’s Facebook page and saw a picture of him with a woman: she had a wrinkled face, watery blue eyes, and gray hair. In the picture next to her, Paul’s face looked larger. He was thirty-five; his arms gripped the woman tightly. She was probably sixty. I recognized her: it was the woman who’d lived down the block from us in Nebraska, whose lawn he’d mowed. That surprised me. But they looked happy. So I thought, Well, they get along. The profile—it was his profile photo—said ‘Married, to Erendita Dantine.’ ” The woman got up and cleared some plates, then sat down. “I make too much out of nothing, maybe. But here’s the end: though I’d published nothing in years, I was invited to Syracuse to give a reading. The morning after, I walked to my old neighborhood and knocked on the door of my former apartment. When a young woman answered, I said I’d lived there once, described the doorknob’s turning in the night, and asked if anything similar had happened to her. She didn’t know what I was talking about. “I had time before my flight, so I went to Taps. The owner’s son was still bartending, though his face was beefy now, and he had a paunch; his old dad was with him. I ordered a vodka-soda and chatted. Neither of them remembered me. Eventually, I said I used to live nearby, in the pink house, where a man had died. “ ‘Otensky,’ the owner said. “I remembered that the bartender had said his father knew him well; I asked the owner to tell me about him. “He told me what I already knew: that he’d been a regular. That he’d come to town to work at the FitzPatrick plant, but once he saved enough money he was going back to where he was from. The owner paused. ‘Midwest somewhere. Oklahoma, Wyoming . . .’ “I said, ‘Nebraska?’ “That was it, he said. ‘The guy had a cute fiancée. Showed everybody her picture. Came here to make quick dough, go home, and buy her a house.’ But there was an accident; the man’s crew was exposed to dangerous levels of radioactive chemicals. The victims were offered treatment, but the guy declined. ‘Maybe he was smart,’ the owner said. ‘The other guys still died.’ He’d heard from locals who’d visited them in the hospital—the skin slid off their faces like putty. “I asked the owner what the guy was like before he died, and the owner said that he only came in a couple of times after the accident, but that he said something about finding a way out. He’d seen medical doctors, naturopathic doctors, homeopathic ones, and finally a Santería. Said he paid her up the wazoo, and that they’d worked out a special deal with the universe. He said he’d gotten permission to do something extraordinary. “I asked what the thing was; he shook his head. “The owner’s son walked outside to smoke. “The owner polished the counter, became expressive. He said that the guy, Otensky, didn’t drink. He just ordered tonics with Rosie’s and read books about quantum mechanics. He bragged that he was smarter than most men, though he’d never been to college. He was a rabbi’s son. The bar owner told me that after the accident, before the radiation affected him, he said, ‘I can do what God tells us we can’t. Do you know why?’ When the owner asked why, he said, ‘Because there is no God. There’s only matter, energy, subatomic particles, and vectors.’ He told the owner that man could do almost anything he wanted through physics, and that thought and matter were intertwined. He said that a person’s whole spirit could be contained within one bit of flesh from the inside of his cheek. “The owner leaned forward. ‘He got crazy,’ he said. He shrugged. ‘He claimed that through a combination of’—he paused—‘quantum entanglement, infrared energy, crystals, and welding tools, he’d welded a piece of himself into the stone in his ring, and that he was going to mail the ring to his fiancée. He told me that he was going to write to her, “I’m going to try to come back to you,” and tell her to take the ring and find a man she liked, and tell him to put it on.’ “I said that was crazy, which it was. “The owner smiled. ‘Guy had a big head,’ he said. ‘Brilliant man, kinda crazy, big head.’ “I was at the door when the owner said, ‘The wife had a weird name. Emeralda. Topaz, something like that.’ ” The people at the dinner table stared blankly at one another. The crime-noir novelist said, “Was the name Erendita?” The woman nodded. The novelist pushed his dessert plate away. “So, the fiancée had the same name as the woman your ex-boyfriend married,” he said. “But that’s just coincidence.” The people at the table yawned. They felt that the story was overlong, and unsatisfying. “I don’t understand,” a painter said. “Let’s see if I got this,” the fantasy writer said. “You and your boyfriend liked each other at first. After living together, you got sick of each other and treated each other like shit. Then you broke up. That’s all relationships. Isn’t it?” “What are you saying?” the crime-noir novelist asked. “Are you saying this guy melted, hung around as a ghost in a lawn chair in Syracuse for thirty years, somehow took possession of your boyfriend, and persuaded you to be his paying escort back to Nebraska? So he could get with his old lady?” The woman shrugged. “Hmm,” the crime-noir novelist said. “It’s kind of a stretch.” Two painters chatted rapidly in Portuguese. They laughed. One turned to the woman and smiled. She said, apologetically, “Stupid story.” The woman nodded. “And the ring?” the crime-noir novelist said. “The stupid elephant ring? What was the deal with that?” The woman didn’t know. After she gave it to Paul, she said, he always wore it. “Interesting,” the crime-noir novelist said. “I guess.” “There’s one more thing,” the woman said. “He published a novel this summer. That’s why I can’t tell you his real name. It’s been on the best-seller list for fifteen weeks.” “Guy’s a writer,” the crime-noir novelist said. “It’s good,” the woman said. “I’m happy for him. But the prose is odd. It’s like the writing of someone who didn’t go beyond eighth grade. Short, simple sentences. Very declarative.” The crime-noir novelist raised his eyebrows. “But every hundred pages or so—” she looked up forlornly—“there’s one sentence that goes on for three pages, full of modifying clauses and gerunds.” The fantasy writer laughed. “Now you’re saying—what? Two authors, one body?” She shrugged. “I don’t know. Say it’s possible. The original owner. And a guest.” The journalist smiled. “So, if there was a ghost, the ghost didn’t choose you.” The fantasy writer spread his hands. “Trivial crap,” he said. “It’s pointless to unpack these things. Every man makes his own path. This guy, Paul, fucked up by sleeping with you. Excuse my honesty. Sure, he got depressed. No man really wants to find out his girlfriend’s a ho-bag. But what’s to worry about? He wrote a best-selling novel. So what if he had to pump old pussy to do it? Even if a man gets half of what he was meant to get, and becomes half of what he was meant to be, that’s good. Who cares how it happens? I hope some dead fuck helps me get where I’m going, too.” The people at the table sighed and shifted in their seats. The night outside was still—the rain had stopped—but in the nearby trailer park a mutt howled. In the yard, the dark stubby shapes of three javelinas trotted through a stand of prickly-pear cactuses. One grunted softly and kicked an empty can, and in the lights of the bungalow’s porch it flashed like a star.

Many years ago, after I retired from the bank, James brought a small terrier to our apartment in Paris. I told him I did not want it. I knew he was trying to keep me occupied, and it is a ridiculous thing, to have a dog. Maybe one day you rise from bed and say, “I would like to pick up five thousand pieces of shit.” Well, then, I have just the thing for you. And for a man to have a small dog—it makes you a fool. “Please,” James said. “Let’s just see how it goes.” I considered the dog, a blond female no bigger than a cat. She had long hair like whiskers over her eyes, so she seemed always to be raising her eyebrows. She sat down, as if she knew that would help her case. James is English and wanted to call her Cordelia, not for “Lear” but for an English novel. It was not the name I would have chosen, but it was not worth the argument. He did a ringmaster act with some toys—a knot of cloth, a ball, a round bed—to show me how good this would be. I had long associated terriers with the barking arts, but this one did not bark. She sniffed at the toys and the bed, waiting for my decision. The next day James was gone to Brazil or Argentina, leaving me with the dog. He had an import business, and was often away. I think Cordelia had already guessed that he was not a sure thing, and she looked at me for our next move. I took her outside to do her business. She was not allowed to go in the impasse, where the cars park and the concierge is always watching, so we went out through the gate to the street. We walked around Paris. We went to the Bois de Boulogne, and there a hawk circled, eying Cordelia like a snack. “Don’t even think of it,” I told this hawk. People spoke to me who would not have before, and they wanted to pet Cordelia, who let them. When we arrived home, Desi was there to make lunch, and she cried out and dropped to her knees to rub the ears of the dog. Desi is from Indonesia, very proper, and she had worked for me for many years, but I had never seen such a display. Cordelia licked her face in greeting, and Desi laughed. Then I sat to read the paper, and Cordelia curled herself into my lap. At first I believed that the appearance of love from a dog is only a strategy, to win protection. Cordelia chose me because I was the one to feed her and to chase away the hawks and the wolves. But after a time we crossed over a line, Cordelia and I. We went out each day to chase the pigeons and smell the piss of other dogs on the trees, and we came home to read the paper. The look with the eyebrows was sometimes skeptical about my actions, and sometimes a question that I understood. There were no arguments except silent ones—I do not want to go there on the leash—and these could be easily solved. Her hair needed to be cut, so I found a woman to do it, who tied pink ribbons over Cordelia’s ears. She hated these ribbons. You could see she was ashamed. I told the groomer no more—she is too dignified for this. And, if she feels shame, then why not other emotions? A creature’s eyes are on you all the time, or the warm body is next to you. There is an understanding. And I think this becomes something like love. I am older now than I thought possible. I did not believe I would ever be this ancient person. The doctor says I should have no wine at lunch, for my heart. But if you cannot have a little wine with your lunch, there is no life. If you are as old as I am, you believed a German would shoot you in the head before you were old enough to have sex with another human being. Everything beyond that becomes extra. The things people do to live long—drinking so much water, running up and down to ruin the knees—this is what the doctor should warn about. James is young, far younger than I. When you are the older man, you can be equal, for a time. He has youth and beauty, but you have money and experience. You know many people, and you can take him to Portofino, to Biarritz, to Capri. It is an old story. But the years go by, and your doctor is concerned for your heart. Your joints are not so good. You don’t want to look in the mirror when you go to take a bath. And the man you love is still strong and young, more or less. He travels a great deal. He is away more often. The dog knew the first time she saw him: he was not the one to rely on. My ex-wife, Simone, comes for lunch sometimes, and we talk of our sons, who are long grown and have children of their own. One lives in New York and the other in Zurich—they are both in the banking. They know James, of course, but they do not like him. There is no reason they would. They are serious men, and James is not. Their children, my grandchildren, are charmed by him. They consider James an uncle. He is the correct age, and he is willing to play with them in a way adults are not. And Simone accepts him, which is in some ways a remarkable thing. Simone looks as she always did, although she says this is only because I never saw her, not really. But I do: she is an elegant woman, all angles, gold bracelets on thin, tan wrists. And she understands what it is to be old, which is a comfort. After she leaves, Desi clears away the lunch dishes, and I take Cordelia out for a walk. There came a point when I realized that James was in Paris only when there was an important party. Every person has one great gift, and James is unequalled at an important party. He is good-looking, of course, with the well-cut brown hair and the trim body and the bespoke suit. He has a brilliant smile, very warm and interested and sincere, and when he talks to people they feel special. He has many other abilities, but this one above all. They want to do business with him because of this attention. He is never looking over the shoulder to see who else is at the party. Who he is talking to, this person gets everything. But then we go home, and the attention goes off like a light. He does not give me the warm and interested smile. He says a thing or two about the party, in the French he speaks like an Englishman but very well. He looks at his phone, swiping with his thumb. He takes his expensive clothes off carelessly, leaves them on the furniture like a child. He has had money always, and good looks, and was his mother’s darling. He says Desi will pick up the clothes, although I tell him this is not her job. He says of course it is, what else is her job? He is careful only with his shoes. He puts them on wooden shoetrees in the closet, then goes into the bathroom and closes the door. I think of the first boy I loved, two lifetimes ago. He came to my family’s house, and I ran inside from playing and saw him standing with his mother. He had a light behind his eyes and a crown of silken curls. He was like someone standing in the sun, even in the dim, cool room. I was still very young, and it was a shock, because it was the first time I knew who I was. He was older than I, and he understood also—I could see that. Then came the war, and the people fleeing Paris, and the Germans in the city. I was sent to England to live with some cousins, and I did not know what happened to this boy. He stayed behind. When I discovered him again, in a night club after the war, he did not like to talk about those years. The beauty that could help him in another time was not so useful during the Occupation. The Germans would be happy to kill him, or to send him to build their bunkers, which would be the same, and I do not know how he escaped. He said he tried to help the Maquis, but the people he knew did not want him. He did not seem strong, or robust. He was not a saboteur. Perhaps he could get information, but they did not trust how he would do it. He was arrested at the end of the war, when the Germans were in a panic, and they simply left him in prison with no food. When I saw him in the night club he had the tuberculose from this prison, but he was still extraordinarily handsome. He seemed very pitiful to me, and very desirable. My older brother had his own flat then, to be independent, but I still lived in the family house. This boy came to visit me when my parents were away. I knew my father would not approve, but it was exciting. I remembered the way the boy had lit up the old carpets, the paintings, the dust floating in the air. One night, the boy and I were eating dinner at one end of the long table in my family house—he was always hungry—when he began to cough. The sound was wet and terrible, and the coughing did not stop. There was blood on the napkin, and his face was purple around the eyes, and then something went very wrong. There was so much blood, and he was coughing, dying, there on the dining-room floor. I didn’t know what to do, how to stop this hemorrhage. I thought, He will open his eyes in a minute, he will smile, he will wipe his mouth and say, “No, no, do not worry. I am fine.” But it did not happen. I heard a roaring like the sea in my ears. My hands were shaking. I telephoned the doctor and my brother, and they came. My brother was furious, concerned only with the scandal of this disreputable night-club boy dying in our family house. “You should have put him in a bathtub,” he said. “For the blood.” I stared at him. When was I to carry him upstairs? There would be blood everywhere if I did this. The doctor was kinder, more practical. He asked if there would be semen on the body, or inside it. I was shocked by the question, but I said no. It was the truth. He said this would make it easier. He asked me to help carry the boy to his car, and I lifted the shoulders. The doctor took the legs. He weighed so little. The head dropped back—the pale face, the bruised eyes—and I could not look, I was filled with horror. The doctor took him away in his car to the morgue and said I was never to speak of it. N’en parlons plus jamais. And, you see, still I find I do not want to say his name. The housekeeper would arrive in the morning, so my brother helped me clean. I moved very slowly, my arms and legs frozen, while my brother gave me orders. I ran cold water on the napkins and towels in the sink, for the blood. I knew I could never repay what the doctor had done. I also knew that my brother would now have the moral advantage over me for the rest of my life. That is what I thought with my hands in the cold pink water, feeling sorry for myself, when it was the boy I loved who was dead. Within the year, I met Simone. She was very appropriate, with a good family, the most graceful lines in a dress. She was in every way correct, and I must have proposed, because there was an engagement, a great announcement. I had never seen my father so happy. My mother was not so sure, but we had no way of discussing this at that time. There was the momentum of the approaching wedding—it was like climbing into an enormous car without brakes. The party, all the people watching, the flowers and the caterers. In front of everyone I knew, I put my grandmother’s ring on Simone’s elegant hand and made promises that I could not keep. Cordelia sleeps on our bed, in the wide gulf between James and me. But she is old now, like me, and she gets down and pees on the rug. I go for the bottle of Perrier, the towel. Then she pees in the hall. James is still asleep, so I clean the hall floor and leave the bottle there. I put on my clothes quietly, and I take the dog outside. Cordelia starts to go in the impasse, which she knows is not allowed. The concierge will come out, the neighbors will complain, it will be a whole issue. I speak to Cordelia, I pull on her leash, but she does not want to move. I pull harder. Finally she follows, very slowly. I could pick her up, but she needs to walk, just a little. This is the important thing, not to stop moving. On the pavement outside the gate, she stands and seems to think about something far away. Her eyes are cloudy. She does not do a shit. She makes a strange sound and falls over. Her feet go up in the air, like a dead dog in a cartoon. “I’m just going to give you a warning this time, and some SPF 50.”Buy the print » Here I become not so dignified. I fall down on my knees on the pavement and put my hands on Cordelia’s chest. I feel no heartbeat, and I try to remember the rules. Two fingers for babies, or you break the ribs. Cordelia is about this size. I put my two fingers on her chest and start to push. I think about the heartbeat—how fast? My own heart is pounding in my ears, too fast, but Cordelia is small. Perhaps the rhythm is right. I press down with each loud pulse in my head. People walk around me on the street. I can feel them stare. A few speak: they ask can they help, should they call an ambulance. I only feel for the pulse. I think, absurdly, of the boy coughing and dying on my floor, in another time. I could not press on his chest because the blood was coming from his lungs, and everything had broken loose. I did not know what to do. Now I press and press. My knees ache, and I think there is broken glass on the pavement, cutting into my skin, but it is only sand and grit. Minutes go by, and more minutes. My arms tremble. I count the times I push, and then stop counting. I wonder if I have broken Cordelia’s ribs. Someone told me once that this pressing does not work without the truc machin—the paddles to the heart. I think if I could open the bony chest I could hold the heart in my hand and squeeze it until it began to beat again. Maybe someone should call an ambulance. But what would the driver say, arriving to see me with an old dog? Do they have this service for animals? I have no feeling in my hand. “Il est mort,” a helpful person says, standing over me. A young man this time. “Elle,” I say. The dog has her feet in the air. The world can see she is not a male. Do the young know nothing? But when I look at her I think he is right—she is dead. “Ouais, bien, elle est morte,” the young man says. And then he is gone. I continue to press. I look at my watch, but I do not know what time we came outside. And then Cordelia coughs. She opens her cloudy eyes. She seems to feel the indignity of her position, and she wriggles until her legs are under her. She coughs again, and shakes her head. She raises her eyebrows, as if to say how ridiculous we are, sitting in the street. What am I thinking, to make her so foolish? I struggle to my feet and pick her up, ignoring the people who stare. I carry her into the impasse. I can feel her heart beating against my arm. We take the tiny elevator—I have no strength for the stairs. In the faded bronze mirror, I have never looked so old. In the apartment, James is awake, holding the Perrier bottle, in a white cotton dressing gown that Desi has ironed. He rubs his face, runs his fingers in his hair. “I didn’t know where you were,” he says. “Outside.” My voice is hoarse. “Another accident?” The green bottle is bright against the white cotton. “The dog is killing me,” I say, and I hand Cordelia into his arms. “She was dead. Now she’s not.” “Dead?” he says. But I have no explaining left in me. My legs will not hold me up. “I’m going to bed.” I go into the bedroom, take off my clothes, step around the piss on the rug, and climb beneath the covers. Then I hear a scratching at the door, which opens, and small footsteps. Cordelia climbs the little carpeted steps at the end of the bed, which James bought when she couldn’t jump up anymore—there is still tenderness in him—and I feel the small body curl beside me. We sleep. James calls the vet, and we take the dog together. The vet says Cordelia is mostly blind, and deaf, and demented. But she wags her tail, she eats some food. She puts on a good show, for the vet. James asks the doctor, in many different ways, if Cordelia’s quality of life is not diminished. This is a code, a hint. He wants the vet to say maybe it is time to kill the dog. I find this more upsetting than I should. But the vet is cheerful and will not say the words. He pretends not to understand. He calls the dog Madame Lazarus and says it is a miracle, she has returned from the dead. Cordelia licks my hand as we drive home: a steady, appreciative lick. She knows. The next morning, James leaves again, for Amsterdam, Dubai, I don’t know. Somewhere is a schedule. Desi comes to clean and make lunch, and I tell her what happened. We study the dog together. Cordelia wags her tail at us, she eats. But she cannot turn her head to the right anymore, only to the left. She turns her whole body in a circle when she wants to look right. No one asks how Lazarus felt after he came out of the tomb. Maybe it was not so good. Maybe he fell over and died again as soon as the people were not watching. Desi goes to work on the spot on the rug, and I think of the morning after the doctor took the boy away, when the housekeeper found that I had washed some napkins and towels. She was French, her gray hair in a tight knot. It was not normal for me to wash anything. She frowned down at the place where the carpet was wet and a little pink, and I told her I had spilled the soup. She looked at me in the steady way of a maîtresse in school. And then she went back to her work, and said nothing. Sometimes Cordelia takes her small steps into an empty room and stands there, staring. I follow to see what she sees: the furniture, the pictures on the walls. But can she see them? She is listening, maybe, for James’s voice. She stands there a long time, waiting for something that does not come. I begin to carry her up and down the stairs and out to the street. Sometimes, after pissing on the rug, she cannot do it outside. I know this feeling, so I squeeze her to help, while people pass by. A river comes out. I carry her a bit so she can smell the air, and I think, My God, what comes next? What comes next is a morning, three months later, when Cordelia does not get out of bed. I carry her to the street, but she cannot stand up. She does not wag her tail. She does not eat. I call James on his mobile in some other country. He sounds busy at first, but then he is listening, paying attention. The tenderness is there. He says, “Chéri, maybe it’s time.” I wait for Desi to arrive. We speak English together, because she does not speak so much French, after so many years. Enough to shop and to eat. She lives with other Indonesians, it is not necessary. “Come with me to the vet,” I say. Desi’s eyes slide away from me, and I see she does not want to go, but then she collects her bag. I carry Cordelia, and we find a taxi. I cannot drive and hold the dog also, and Desi does not drive. The taxi-driver talks on his mobile, the radio is low—all in Arabic. Desi sits with her hands folded on her bag. Cordelia is very still in my lap. I think about seeing that boy the first time, when I was only a child, before everything happened. The crown of hair, the dazzling eyes, the bolt of understanding. N’en parlons plus jamais. At the vet’s office, I ask Desi to come to the back with me, but she shakes her head. She will wait. The vet greets Cordelia, cheerful as before. “Madame Lazarus!” he says. But I do not want more jokes. I put her on the table. The doctor examines her. I press my hands together to stop the shaking. I feel a skip in my heart and think of the wine I will have at lunch. “Ah, Cordelia,” the doctor says, stroking her. “Tu n’es pas immortelle, après tout.” Cordelia looks for the source of the touch, with her cloudy eyes. The doctor says it might be time. He says all the lines James suggested to him before, about the diminishing quality of life. I ask him to wait a moment. I go out to the waiting room, where Desi is sitting with a girl with purple hair and a small diamond in her nose. A big sheepdog lies at the girl’s feet. It lifts its heavy head to look at me, to see if I am a threat. “Desi,” I say. “The vet says it’s time. Will you come in?” Desi shakes her head, tears in her eyes. “I can’t,” she whispers. “I can’t see it.” “Don’t make her,” the purple-haired girl says. She has a German accent. “It’s terrible. I was here two months ago, with my old dog, and I cried for a week after.” I look at the German girl, whose business it is not. She is strong, a little heavy in the hips. I am the age of her grandfather. I do not want to talk about her dog, killed in this doctor’s office. I turn back to Desi. “Please come in,” I say. But Desi says no. She has cooked my food, cleaned my house, picked up after James for so many years I cannot count. Her job is to do as I ask, but she will not do this. “I can’t,” she says, and she is pleading. So I go back alone to the room where Cordelia is on the table. Her eyes look at nothing. James was right to bring her home, to give me something to take care of. “You look terrible,” the vet tells me. “Sit down.” The nurse brings me a glass of water and says something comforting. I think of James, our long life together, his shoetrees in the closet, his clothes on the floor. The dog is the last string to tie him to me, and now—snip. Soon I will start walking into the bedroom, staring at nothing, listening for voices that are not there. “It’s your decision,” the vet says. I nod. “You can hold her,” the nurse says, and she puts Cordelia into my arms. Then she puts a pad on my leg like a diaper, beneath the dog, and I think, This will be bad. Cordelia sniffs my hand, licks it once, and I am no longer sure about the quality of her life. She can still smell the world, she can still love. But then I remember the morning. Her legs not holding her up. I wish for a wild moment that I had brought Simone with me, my loyal wife, but she has never liked dogs. Allergique. The doctor is working—he ties a tourniquet on Cordelia’s leg, and then he prepares a needle. I think he will miss, he will jab it in my arm. But he doesn’t, he slips it into her thin leg where I can’t imagine there is a vein. Cordelia looks around the room for something. We have to wait some minutes for the tranquillizer to work. I feel her pulse in her throat and think again that this is a mistake. Three months ago, I got on my knees to push blood through this small body, and now I am letting the doctor kill her. She closes her eyes, and I think I will tell him this is wrong, but he is already there with another needle, another injection. Cordelia flinches, she makes a little sigh. Then her head sinks, and her chin is on my hand, her throat soft. The white pad on my leg becomes heavy—she has gone in the wrong place one more time. The doctor takes her from me, and the nurse puts her hand on my shoulder. Out in the waiting room, the German girl has her arm around Desi, and the two of them are crying. The sheepdog’s head is on the girl’s knee. Desi looks at me, her eyes wet and swollen, and I wonder, for the first time, if Cordelia will be the last string for Desi, also. She could find a new job and start again. She might find children to care for, to delight her as Cordelia did. It would be more interesting than an old man. I reach into my pocket for my wallet, but the receptionist shakes her head, makes a little gesture of sympathy. This is something, at least. They do not make you pay. If we lived in the country, we could wrap Cordelia in a blanket and bury her, but we have nowhere, so we leave her with the vet. My arms feel empty. Outside, we wait for a taxi. I see an old man walking down the street, bent almost in half, even older than I. He would have been a young man during the war, but old enough to fight or to work or to run. I think I need something to carry. My mind is confused. I have just killed my dog. A taxi pulls up to the curb. I turn to Desi, who is blowing her nose, looking at something in the street. Her black hair has some gray now. I never see her outside, in the sunlight. Her bag, bright yellow, hangs on her arm. “Don’t leave me,” I say. Desi looks up, surprised. Her eyes are red. The taxi is waiting, impatient. I think I will say everything now, I will speak of everything. There is not so much time. “Please don’t leave,” I say.

It ends with his right hand gripping her left, the curve of her knuckles the pulling yoke. The plane is on its final approach. Greater Cincinnati lies ahead. Outside, it’s dark, snowing lightly. Every window seems to have concluded its broadcast day, though in houses down below people idle in front of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Lucy Show.” Whatever might happen above is not their concern. The landing gear is set. In two miles, the runway. Flaps 50. Altimeters cross-checked on zero seven. Inside the cabin, he squeezes her hand harder. The flight manifest lists them as Theodore Harris Martin (9B) and Emma Callahan Brady (6A), both from Los Angeles, specifically Studio City. The date is November 20th and the year is 1967 and the time is 8:57 P.M. It’s a Monday. In three days, it will be Thanksgiving. That is what we know. We also know that seven weeks earlier the Los Angeles Dodgers played their final game of the season, at home against the New York Mets. It was a Sunday afternoon, October 1st. The weather was warm, the sky cloudless—a perfect day for baseball, Vin Scully proclaimed to his radio audience. The stadium was half full, which even the most optimistic fan, looking around, would consider almost empty. No surprise. It was a meaningless game. A year ago, these Dodgers had been in the World Series, but now, without Koufax, they were third from last, last being these lowly Mets. The players seemed embarrassed to be there, like men pretending to be boys pretending to be men. Only Don Drysdale appeared at ease. The Big D signed autographs during batting practice, his veteran smile holding forth on reminiscences of broken-down buses and second-rate hotels, hours spent packed in ice, all those hero-to-bum ratios. Ted Martin, thirty-five, stood near the third-base rail, sheepish among the children, his left arm reaching forward, in his hand a baseball. He and Don shared a Van Nuys pedigree, only a few grades separating them in high school, though Don would retire soon, while Ted would remain a lawyer with fugitive dreams. You can’t pin all your hopes on just one thing, that’s what Ted’s wife said. You need options. Like an actual career. Then again, Carol was a practical woman who distrusted too much encouragement, except when it came to her singing in church. “Here you go, kid.” Drysdale placed the baseball back into Ted’s hand, and Ted wondered if “kid” was tongue in cheek, a jab between middle-aged men, or merely a function of the bottom line, pupils focussed on the endgame of ink. Were we all kids here? Ted lingered for a moment in the chorus before returning to his seat, and as he climbed toward his row he found himself wavering between feeling very young and feeling very old. His plan was to lord the baseball over his daughters, evidence of what they had missed: contact with a bona-fide All-Star, a future Hall of Famer, Don Drysdale in the flesh. Yesterday, the girls had begged him to let them skip the game—Please, please, please, Dad—so they could work on some Sunflower Girl project, and Ted had given in and last minute had to corral other people, which reminded him of his limited supply of friends, all of them busy today, the seats starting to signify a greater failure, until Renshaw from the office said yeah, sure, and asked if he could bring his twelve-year-old son, Renshaw Jr., the two of them visible up ahead. “Hot-dog guy came,” Renshaw said. “Peanuts, too,” Renshaw Jr. added. This information was self-evident and rather explicit on their faces. Ted stood there, delaying the knee-to-knee proximity. Over the stadium P.A., “I’m a Believer” played as a message for the fans next year. Ted’s oldest daughter loved Davy Jones; he could hear her shriek in his head. “You get anyone?” Renshaw asked. Ted showed him the ball as if it had been baptized and now possessed a soul. “Who’s that?” “Drysdale.” Renshaw nudged Renshaw Jr. This father-and-son combo reminded Ted of those before-and-after panels glimpsed in magazines, in this case advertising the effects of adolescence, of alcohol and age, of a hundred-pound weakling swelling into a thick vindictive bully, which gave Ted brief guilt since he had been the golden boy in high school, with enviable skin and a natural physique, a poor representative of the awkward teen-age years. And all for what, he wondered. To grow up and play the role of lawyer—like Robert Redford, another Van Nuys graduate, except his character in “Barefoot in the Park” married a free spirit and lived in New York City, in Greenwich Village, no less, and there was no church and there were no daughters and no Fluffy the goddam cat. There was only sex—sex and the most innocent and lovely of misunderstandings. “You should go,” Renshaw said to Renshaw Jr. “Huh?” “Go and get Drysdale’s autograph.” Renshaw Jr. stopped chewing his peanuts. “Got no pen,” he said. “Drysdale will have a pen.” “And got”—he swallowed—“nothing for him to sign.” “Use your program, nitwit.” Disarmed of excuses, Renshaw Jr. began clearing his lap of half-eaten food, no easy chore, and in the process knocked from his knee a box of popcorn that tumbled to the ground and shattered into its affiliated parts. The boy froze, perhaps hoping that this pose might suspend the ramifications of the spill. “Jesus Christ,” Renshaw said. You would have thought a prized vase had been broken. Renshaw turned to Ted. “Count yourself lucky you only have girls.” “Well—” Ted started. “No, believe me. Brainless doesn’t begin to do him justice.” The boy glanced up from the mess, his hands still maintaining the spiritual weight of what was lost. Ted had no desire to witness any further humiliations en route to Drysdale, so he hitched deliverance to a smile, in the mode of athletes and actors who squint at the light that glows from within—in this case, of Ted Martin, benevolent adult. “Here you go, kid,” and with that he tossed the baseball, well advertised in advance, something his middle daughter could have caught and she was easily the least coördinated of his girls, but maybe the sun was in Renshaw Jr.’s eyes, or he was distracted by the fallen popcorn; either way, the ball slipped through his hands, hit the concrete, and rolled into the gutter under the seats in front of them. Renshaw Jr. panicked, practically upending himself in the retrieval. “Hopeless,” Renshaw said. Around noon that day, people raised their hands in nearby Elysian Park and sought the return of the Great Spirit. It was the second love-in of the year, an unofficial follow-up to the first, which had been held on Easter and was still talked about in certain tuned-in circles. At least four thousand people had attended. A beautiful gathering of the tribes. And the Diggers had really outdone themselves with the food, in particular those psychedelic watermelons. The Flamin’ Groovies had played, as had the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the Rainy Daze and a few other bands only half-remembered. Oh, and Barry McGuire had made an appearance, dressed as Adam, and someone later spotted him destroying some Eve under a Navajo blanket. It had been a magical day, though the Los Angeles Times had dubbed it “a camp-out of the camp, a rejoicing of the rejected.” This time around, there was no reporter on the scene, and there was no formal stage, no Chet Helms giving his blessing on behalf of the humans of the Haight; this Sunday roughly a thousand people came together in the hope of re-creating the past, and, as with many copies, the sharpness was blurred around the edges, its unique and special vibe desaturated, giving the proceedings an aura of forced joyfulness. Every smile insisted on another smile in return. Not that Emma Brady, thirty-three, noticed. She stood on the periphery and smiled, because this was all new to her, this roller-coaster ride of people. “Hello,” she said, whenever someone dipped into her line of sight, unsure if she really belonged here. Was she the sacrificial square? The parental mirror? Emma was only fifteen, ten, maybe as little as five years older than most of the assembled crowd, yet they all seemed so young compared with her state of affairs: more than a decade married, the mother of three boys, the youngest, six years old, by her side. “What are they doing, Mommy?” he asked. “Praying, I think.” “To God?” “Well, to a god.” Bobby thought about this and then said, “Like Sandy Koufax?” “No, more like Pete Rose,” Emma teased, since she was a Cincinnati Reds fan while the men under her roof bled Dodger blue. This weekend, the older boys and her husband were camping at Lake Casitas, and there had been pressure for her to go, to have the whole family together. C’mon, Em, we’ll fish and canoe and have a grand old time, or so her husband had said. Please. Join us. No, honey, not today. Not this weekend. Sorry. She was exhausted and in no mood to act as pioneer woman in gingham and kerchief. Two nights, that’s all, honey. Just like Mike to keep pushing, to treat her like the sullen daughter who was being difficult for the sake of being difficult. His enthusiasm always had the quality of a concealed weapon. And of course little Bobby had insisted on staying with her, his brown eyes like rising water and she his only means of escape, and this had really rucked Mike, though he would save the outburst for easier game, like the boys. Or the dog. Poor Tiger bore much residual blame. “Who are they?” Bobby asked. “Hippies, or most of them,” Emma said, though she could see other curious tourists like herself who had waded into this patchwork of suède and macramé, beads and exposed skin. The drums grew louder, and a more unified “om” vibrated the air. There was a main circle of people, a handful of committed participants at its center, many of them dancing with some kind of prop, while others gestured in ways that seemed to reference a greater mystical force. An array of musical instruments joined the fray, not necessarily in order or in tune: a guitar, a tambourine, a flute and a violin, their harmony squirming through the narrowest of openings. “This is weird,” Bobby said. Outside the main circle, smaller circles turned like human-size gears. “Yeah,” Emma agreed, and she wondered if this was like Easter—“On Easter, of all days,” Mike had complained when he saw the coverage on the local news. “Who are these people, to do this on Easter? I’m trying very hard to understand.” He certainly hadn’t looked to Emma for an explanation. A large man in a tuxedo and a top hat wandered by holding a dozen yellow balloons, each stencilled with the word “LOVE,” the sentiment seeming in opposition to his face, which was painted a ghoulish white. He spotted Bobby and stopped. “You wanna balloon?” Emma wondered if he was a struggling actor, an unemployed mime. Were all these people out-of-work artists? “Sure,” Bobby said. The man handed him one. “What are you going to give me in return?” “Um.” Emma reached for her pocketbook. “No money,” the man said. “Something else. An exchange of goods.” “I don’t think I have anything that you would want,” Emma tried to explain. “Sorry,” the man said, “I’m talking to the boy.” Bobby patted his pockets, produced a rabbit’s foot. “I’ve got this.” The man raised the fur toward the sun. “Is it lucky?” he asked. “Never done me any good.” Before this remark could fully sink in, of her son and his feelings of doom, of being jinxed, of always losing stuff and getting injured, of being too short, too dumb, totally talentless compared to his popular older brothers, and his father no help, either—Stop moping around—before Emma could glimpse her own self-doubt in those words, the man in the tuxedo and top hat had handed Bobby two more balloons. “Here’s your change,” he said. Frisella was pitching for the Mets, Foster for the Dodgers, and after six innings New York was winning, 1–0, with Moock scoring in the second on Bosch’s base hit to left. L.A. had managed only five scattered singles and was looking listless in the field—the diamond might as well have been a classroom clock on the last day of school. Ted maintained an orderly box score, something his father had taught him to do when they went to see the old Hollywood Stars at Gilmore Field, back when the Pacific Coast League was the only game in town. He enjoyed transcribing the action into the shorthand of LOBs and IBBs, the forward or backward K, the almost algebraic equations of SAC 8 and F 9 and DP 1-6-3. Here, human position was expressed in pencil, fate as a form of filling in the blanks. FC 4-6. “What are you doing?” Renshaw Jr. asked. The boy had recovered the ball, his sweaty palms rendering Drysdale’s signature a blur. “Keeping score,” Ted said. “That’s more than just the score.” “This is what’s behind the score,” Ted explained. “Like with the last inning, here’s Davis and his fly ball to right, and Ferrara’s single to center, and Roseboro, remember he had a pop fly to third, and then Fairly grounded to first—it’s all right here.” “Seems like homework,” Renshaw Jr. said. “I hear he turned water into wine, but it was a rather poor-quality Mesopotamian Cabernet.”Buy the print » “Not really. It just keeps you involved,” Ted said. “I like knowing what happened when Swoboda was last up—he grounded out, but before that he had a single, and maybe Foster will pitch him differently this inning, maybe not, but I have that information right here, the whole story. It’s like I’m a necessary witness.” Renshaw snorted before finishing his fourth beer. “What?” Ted asked. “Can’t we just watch the lousy game?” “Your boy was curious.” “No, he was just asking a stupid question.” “Well, I was giving him an answer.” “That wasn’t an answer, that was—I don’t know what the hell that was.” Ted heard a hint of his wife in the tone, an impatience that bordered on outright scorn, as though his brand of parenting interfered with the actual business of raising children, Carol constantly hovering nearby, an impresario reminding him to wrap things up, like at bedtime—especially at bedtime, and his habit of tucking in the girls and reciting from memory “The Children’s Hour,” by Longfellow: From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. Ted would insert his daughters’ names and sort of perform the poem, and maybe it was a bit long, and corny, too, but it was something he enjoyed doing, and something he thought the girls enjoyed hearing, and it was certainly better than the Monkees, and maybe they would remember a few stanzas and recall those moments with Dad and how he gave them a love for old-fashioned poetry regardless of any mutterings that it was getting late and the girls needed their sleep and instead of Longfellow how about a nice haiku? Carol always paused after one of her clever lines, anticipating laughter from an audience, it seemed. Was he pedantic and sentimental? Was there a worse combination? Swoboda grounded to short. How would he score his own existence? “Hey, necessary witness, you get that?” Renshaw cracked. Ted gave him a middle-finger grin. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said. “We shall try not to bear false witness in your absence.” Then Renshaw cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward home, “Moock, you stink!” In Elysian Park, a growing line of people held hands and weaved through the crowd as fast as they could, the leader the needle guiding the thread. Bobby was somewhere in the middle. It had been too tempting for him to let pass without joining, and he had handed his mother the three balloons and jumped onto the end, holding this position briefly until others grabbed on and the line grew longer, its stitching more intricate. Emma watched from a distance. Every now and then, Bobby swung into view and she smiled and waved, feeling glad to be here, the strangest of Sunday picnics. A group nearby smoked marijuana from a peace pipe, just as she imagined they would, and she wondered about LSD, having seen that recent “Dragnet” episode with the sugar cubes and the acid freaks, the crazed blue boy. Detective Sergeant Joe Friday gave her husband yet another reason for his strict parenting. “These stories are true, Emma. These are simply the facts.” Mike could relate to Joe. After all, every father carries a kind of badge. And Emma just nodded along. But the people in Elysian Park seemed to be having a wonderful time, no bum trips in evidence, just a warm-flowing affection. She spotted Bobby again. They would have to keep this afternoon a secret. Once more she smiled and waved, and a palpable lightness came over her, possibly thanks to the balloons and the roving psychedelia, and even if this lightness could somehow lift her up from the ground and float her above the trees, no one around here would have noticed, or, in noticing, would have thought anything peculiar. Ted had no desire to return to the Renshaws; instead, he wandered around the concourse, thinking he should buy something for the girls, a pennant, maybe, but his mind was unable to commit to any purchase, and he soon found himself corkscrewing down the pedestrian ramp. The sensation of clandestine escape thrilled him, as though he had been called to action by a higher power, his wristwatch synched for some secret plan. Leave. Ted often thought about his destiny, about why he was here and for what purpose—to take out the trash, Carol would have cracked—and though there was a touch of narcissism in these meditations, a certain kind of hubris, in the end destiny seemed more like a gun pressed into his back leading him to who knows where. Just walk. And no funny business. Sometimes he figured the only question was where he would drop. Right now the snub-nosed barrel pushed him clear of Dodger Stadium and the Renshaws, and once outside prodded him away from his station wagon and toward Elysian Park. A single word hung in his head—“avocados.” He would bring avocados to the girls. Ted walked through the parking lot quilted with cars, and then fewer cars, until finally the empty gray plain ended on an accumulation of hills and trees and grass. The tint was more sepia than green, as if nature were an old photograph in the city’s scrapbook. An image of Ted’s father arose: the times he had taken him into the park to watch the filming of another Ken Maynard Western, with the horseplay and the shooting—his dad had been an accountant for Republic Pictures—and afterward they hunted for avocados, Ted in charge of climbing ever higher, his father directing from below. “Where else can you get free fruit in this town?” he would say. Twenty-five years later, Ted was back on the hunt. His shoes were all wrong for the task, the soles nothing but slip, and he grew winded from hiking the switchbacks to the top. He tried to remember where the avocado trees were, and when he finally found them, he struggled up the trunks in search of hidden fruit, it being late in the season. His wife hated avocados, something about the mushy texture reminding her of rotten flesh, as if she were on intimate terms with decay, and no doubt the girls would follow suit, but maybe he could show them the pleasures of the pit, how you could cut around the middle and twist and the halves would come apart around a hard center, a world hidden within a world—Carol would roll her eyes here—and how you could remove the pit and poke in a few toothpicks and rest this Sputnik half submerged in a glass of water, and in a few weeks you’d have the beginnings of a tree right there on the windowsill and some day avocados in the Martin back yard. This scenario played in Ted’s imagination as he searched the picked-over trees, dirtying his slacks and splitting a seam on his shirt, but on the fifth tree he spotted a runt, hanging high, its existence, once noted, hijacking the scene, like a dangling grenade. It took some atavistic climbing for Ted to reach that gnarled and hardly worth the effort avocado. But he had it. In his hand. It was ridiculous, but it was his. He paused for a moment, wedged between the branches, and from this peaceful vantage he could hear beating beyond the beating of his own heart, a beating of drums, like that of Indians of old, as if “The Fiddlin’ Buckaroo” were being shot in a nearby field. It was coming from over that hill, beyond that line of trees. Boom. Boom. Boom. Then Ted saw three balloons rising like a smoke signal, yellow balloons, neck and neck in the midday sky, and he thought of his daughters, though this thought was mostly buried and what emerged was an unexpected feeling of sadness, watching those three balloons disappear, as if the earth had been let go from someone’s hand. “Where are the balloons?” Bobby asked when he returned. Emma had a sense that he would want to bring them home and show his brothers and possibly brag about how he and Mom had had a swell time without them, went to Elysian Park, where there was a whole mess of people, some barely in clothes, like happies—happies? you mean hippies—yeah, yeah, hippies, and they had chanted and played games and he had traded his rabbit’s foot for these balloons, and his father, probably still in that flannel shirt and cartoonish fishing hat, would buttress his hands against his waist and give Emma the look that seemed his birthright, a look she feared seeing in her own boys, though in fairness Mike could also be loving, and fun, and certainly had a creative side, but so often that looseness snapped back into sanctimony, and the person she had loved without children, with children, she loved less. He had become nothing but father. The balloons would require an explanation and would garner that look, and Emma was unsure how many more of those looks she could survive. “They just blew away,” she told Bobby. “Oh.” “A big breeze suddenly came and—” Emma opened her fingers as illustration. “Oh.” “I’m sorry.” “It’s O.K.,” Bobby said, taking her hand. And this was what she always forgot: how Bobby made her failures his own. Instead of Ken Maynard riding his white stallion, Tarzan, the field below offered up an odder scene, as if the police had gathered all the kids who loitered in West Hollywood and Venice Beach, the stragglers glimpsed from passing cars, who were sometimes in the news, as in the recent rumors of a Haight-Ashbury outbreak in Beverly Hills, and deposited them here, in these few acres, all the freaks of L.A. It resembled a seasonal convocation, like one of those paintings by Bruegel which Ted loved, and as he walked downhill he could feel himself becoming an unexpected yet essential detail: man holding avocado, in torn shirt and grubby slacks. His presence was as appropriate as the people breathing fire or juggling or running in a circle half-naked: regardless of realms of being, all and sundry were turned toward a rapturous, if uncertain, center. “Hello, friend,” someone said. “Hello,” Ted answered, and then “Hello” again, and again, until he started offering up his own greeting without cue, like this was the first day of school, and every one of his hellos was met with equal enthusiasm, a great big sloppy welcome. He could hear Carol muttering something about the smell and what these people were smoking and could you somehow be affected as well because she had heard stories and in this day and age you had to hold tight to reason and if need be rely on tranquillizers for a decent night’s sleep, and Ted, please stop saying hello—much of the pleasure of being here was walking with the spectre of his wife, defining himself in opposition to her attitude. “Hello.” Sh-h-h. Halfway around the circle, Ted noticed something, someone, a flash of the familiar among the unfamiliar. The woman had no name, only a shape that slotted within Clinton Elementary, the child on her arm the youngest of three boys, a mirror to his own three girls, who fit between them like rungs on a ladder. He had seen her at the school before, and, though they had never exchanged words, he remembered a particular slyness that seemed to set her apart from the other mothers, a tilt of the head that sized up the world, a divot of suspicion across her brow. Ted stared at her in the hope of becoming visible, as if she alone had the ability to see him, and when that failed he went over and said hello. “Hi,” she said back. “No, I know you,” he said. “Or, I mean, I know you without knowing you, I mean, sorry, let me begin again: I think we have children at the same school.” The polite veil lifted and her eyes sharpened, the sudden focus almost pulling Ted forward. “Oh, that’s right,” she said, smiling with tactile consequences. Her front teeth were somewhat bucked, which only added to her over-all abundance. “You have girls,” she said. “And you have boys.” “Almost the same age.” “Almost the same age.” They practically sang this like a lyric. “And here’s my youngest,” she said. “Bobby, say hi.” “Hi, Mister.” “Martin,” Ted said. “Ted Martin.” “Emma Brady.” The thought of shaking hands passed between them, their indecision almost blush-worthy, until too much time had elapsed and the introductions fell to their feet. “Quite a circus?” Ted said. “Bobby and I were just—” Emma was explaining when Bobby interrupted. “There are, like, four guys on stilts,” he said, “and a monkey, too.” “Yeah, I was at the Dodger game—” “Really?” from Bobby. “Uh-huh.” “They win?” “Still going on but losing when I—” “They stink.” “They sure do,” Ted said, wishing he had a son who might settle him, might confirm his role as a father instead of as punch line for the girls and you’ll-never-understand and let-me-handle-this from Carol, his non-member status essential for their exclusive club—the clueless dad, the hopeless husband. The women in his life assumed his eternal collaboration, never as the star but as the supporting player, none of them realizing how quickly this could change, how suddenly he could step forward, if pushed even slightly. “Who was pitching for the Dodgers?” Bobby asked. “Alan Foster.” “Who?” “Exactly.” They both laughed, man to boy. “Sexy deep-sea diver’s not a thing.”Buy the print » Ted Martin, Emma repeated to herself, because she was bad with names and had been told repetition helped; Ted Martin, who had a wife who was blond and pretty but with a ridiculous hairdo, more like a silken shower cap, and who wore these elaborately knotted scarves; Ted Martin, her husband, the man who sat by her side during those school plays and recitals, those all-parent functions, his leg often tapping and his wife stilling him with a touch and a grin that was more public apology; Ted Martin, his attention shifting from the stage and toward the rafters, as if spotting something up there; Ted Martin, Emma christened in retrospect, the golden husband with the golden wife and the golden daughters, the golden couple of Clinton Elementary, of Studio City, and how he had once caught her looking up as well, hoping to see whatever circled overhead; Ted Martin, here in Elysian Park, laughing with her son, striking a pitcher’s pose, a small green ball in his hand. “They sorely miss Koufax,” he said. “What’s that?” Bobby asked, pointing toward his hand. “An avocado, and not a particularly good one, but it’s late in the season and all the trees around here have been pretty well scavenged. Did you know there were avocado trees here? A lot of them. All kinds of fruit trees. It used to be something I did with my dad.” Ted Martin flipped the avocado to himself. “Hey, if I threw this, you think you could catch it, Willie Mays?” Bobby nodded. “You sure?” “Yep.” “ ’Cause I’m going to toss it high, like above-the-trees high.” Bobby backed up, giddy at this adult challenge. “And you better catch it. I don’t want a bruise on this piece of free fruit.” “But not too high,” Bobby said. “O.K., not too high,” Ted agreed. “You sure you’re ready?” Bobby nodded again. “On the count of three, then. One.” In preparation, Ted Martin cranked his arm back, his torso angled toward the sky, and Emma smiled at the obvious exaggeration—“You sure you’re ready now?”—the full metre of his name having sunk in—“Two. Better not drop it, kid”—so that every breath seemed to scan him, seemed to rise and fall over the architecture of a Ted Martin home—“You sure you’re ready?”—Emma noticing the split seam on his shirt, along the left shoulder, the skin beneath a streak of sun—“Three.” After that day in the park, Ted Martin and Emma Brady each resumed their regularly scheduled existence as father and mother, husband and wife, though there were moments that still interrupted, all very innocent, like that easy toss and the game of catch, the dog that stole the avocado and the ensuing chase, a total of thirty minutes spent together before the clock turned toward the deeper meaning of an hour and they both came to the same conclusion, that they should go, it was getting late, so goodbye and maybe see you around school. Once back at home and reëstablished in their routine, they found their moods tightening, their ears sick of the everyday complaints, their mouths barely able to answer the everyday questions, neither fully understanding the repercussions of this chance meeting, those glimpses from Elysian Park which seemed to confirm their fate: they were trapped. It was one of those small things that could breed a tremendous amount of discontent, but soon the groove sank into the larger rut of days, and weeks, and months, the memory losing its attraction, its melodramatic possibility, and shifting instead to the silly fantasy of a school-yard crush on a fellow-parent, my goodness, as absurd as those hippies on stilts. By the time the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in the World Series, Ted Martin and Emma Brady had mostly forgotten one another and what endured was resignation: this is my life and it is a perfectly fine life. Thanksgiving was on November 23rd that year. Emma Brady was going to Cincinnati the Monday before, so that she could help her overwhelmed parents get ready for the onslaught of family. The new live-in housekeeper would handle the boys and cook their meals until the three of them flew east, on the twenty-second, with their father. When Mike heard this plan, he gave Emma his patented look, blue eyes narrowing as though her faulty logic were blinding, as though his gift to the world were reason, practically in his hands, right here, Emma, reason, take it, but Emma no longer cared about these looks, having negotiated her own terms from the above resignation, like hiring a live-in housekeeper, and going to Cincinnati, early and alone. “I really wish we were going together,” Mike said, as he pulled up to the curb for departures. “Makes so much more sense. Your parents have done Thanksgiving before. They can cook a turkey.” “I’ll call when I get to their house,” Emma said. “And you’re missing Pete being a Pilgrim, a minor Pilgrim but a Pilgrim. He’s disappointed. We all are.” Mike seemed to tick these points from the roof of his mouth, as if he maintained a list up there, his tongue the enumerating finger. “It’s not too late,” he said. Emma was barely listening; instead, she was imagining Ted Martin in the audience at the school play, sitting with his wife, his daughters probably Indian princesses, their hair the promise of native maize; Ted Martin, reformed in her mind; Ted Martin, sharper than before. “I should check in,” Emma said, opening the car door. “I can help with your bag.” “You should go.” A gesture brought a skycap. “I’ll call.” “I don’t like this,” Mike said. “I don’t like being separated like this. I really think you should stay.” His habit of always trying to win an argument, even when there was no argument to win, softened, and his eyes reverted to a warmer memory, of South Sea waters and a honeymoon that got Emma pregnant before she truly understood the meaning of sex. “I’ll see you soon.” Emma leaned back into the car and kissed him on the cheek. T.W.A. Flight 128, en route to Boston, Massachusetts, with stops in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was departing at 5:37 P.M. from Gate 39. Ted Martin was behind schedule, a combination of bad traffic and his propensity for misgauging time, his internal clock always optimistic, as if he were the hero destined to arrive before the countdown reached zero. His wife hated this quality. Carol insisted on being early, waiting and checking her watch, her punctuality a lit fuse. But Carol was home, getting dinner ready for 6 P.M. sharp, while Ted was heading to Boston for a meeting on Tuesday. It was a job that no one else had wanted, since it was so close to Thanksgiving, but Ted enjoyed travelling, in particular flying; as a boy he would go to the Burbank airport with his dad and watch the Douglas DC-3s take to the air. “Still amazes me,” his father would say. “Every time they lift up seems a small miracle.” So Ted had volunteered for the mission and was now rushing through the terminal with only five minutes to spare, the flight already boarding on the tarmac. He weaved between people and warned them by way of preëmptive apology, his smile natural and broad, like the Juice chalking up another touchdown for U.S.C. When he got to Gate 39, he flashed his ticket at the attendant and she practically cheered him on through—Go, Ted Martin, go—and he maintained his speed right up the stairs, stepping into the cabin and half-expecting the passengers to greet him with applause. The plane was a Convair 880 and had seventy-five passengers with another seven in crew. Of course, nobody on board was aware of the particular story, of the sudden change in personal dynamics when Ted Martin and Emma Brady locked eyes, of the absolute recalibration of the world within that confined space. They both startled without moving, Ted in the aisle, Emma in her seat. What had been forgotten now came speeding back: Elysian Park on that beautiful fall day, the drums, the dancing. Ted was the first to smile. “Hi,” he said. “Hi,” she said back. “Going to Boston?” “Cincinnati.” Before anything else could be said, the stewardess prompted Ted to his seat. Three rows separated them, and as the cabin crew went through the safety procedures Ted and Emma seemed to experience every version of possible danger: the turbulence, the sudden loss of oxygen, even the remote possibility of a water landing. Ted could glimpse the back of Emma’s head, a shag cut, different from the bouffant of seven weeks ago, while Emma could feel the force of Ted’s green-gray eyes peering from behind—like sea glass, she recalled from that day in the park, a surprising piece of treasure. Tray tables were raised, smoking materials extinguished, and they both thought, We are alone. The airplane rose over Los Angeles and then headed east, the lowering sun like its counterweight, a reminder of what was being left behind, and in its place the lift and flow of what lay ahead. After the plane reached a cruising altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, the “Fasten Seat Belt” and “No Smoking” signs dimmed, and Ted rose without internal debate. He solicited all the powers of his charm and asked the older woman sitting next to Emma if she might possibly change seats with him so that he could talk with his friend and—God bless her—she agreed, with an almost expectant smile, as if she had been reverently waiting for this request. “Thank you so much,” Ted said, settling her into 9B. “Enjoy the flight,” she told him. And here they were, after seven weeks, seven weeks of leaving behind that day in Elysian Park, not even a day but thirty minutes, almost two days passing for every minute they had spent together, a minuscule percentage, and even less when measured against the length of a marriage. “Good to see you again,” Ted said. “You, too,” Emma said. “I like your hair.” “Really? No one else does.” “Well, I do.” “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a change, you know, even if it’s silly.” And this was the beginning. Over Nevada they flew, over Utah and Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, the distance gained bringing them closer together, as they both had screwdrivers, and white wine with their chicken fricassee, then more drinks, the two of them talking about their lives without ever mentioning spouses or children, their lives before they became what they became, as if up here they could begin again, begin again as the same people in different lives—in Paris, in New York, in London—and they smiled and seemed to recognize themselves in the other’s reflection, this attraction between strangers slowly growing into a passion between co-conspirators who could blow up the world in order to start another. What seemed impossible alone, together seemed possible. “Maybe I should stay in Cincinnati,” Ted said. “I’ll be with my parents,” Emma said. “Well, I’m due in Boston.” “So . . .” “We could both get delayed, make our phone calls, head to the nearest hotel.” Ted had never been so bold, Emma so accommodating. “A hotel,” she said, head tilting. “Yes.” “The two of us,” she said, “in a hotel.” “We can be Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Ted leaned in closer. “Since I met you, you’ve been a pulse in my head. It’s like we are meant to be, like we’re connected, you know, like the universe is insisting on us being together. Maybe that sounds silly, as silly as your haircut.” “And our families?” Emma asked. That was the first mention of them. “The truth is, I see only two people here,” Ted said. These words, they seemed scripted. And here we are again, back to the beginning, which is the end. All the passengers have buckled their seat belts. The plane is on its final approach to Runway 18 of the Greater Cincinnati Airport. Light snow is visible through the windows. As the landing gear lowers, Ted Martin reaches for Emma Brady’s hand. This is their first touch of skin. We know from transcripts that the pilot and co-pilot reported no issues from the cockpit. Altimeters set and cross-checked on zero seven. Yaw damper, check. All is good. Ted squeezes Emma a bit harder, his thumb rubbing her thumb. They both hate landings. At 8:57 P.M., the airplane clips a few tree branches at an elevation of 875 feet m.s.l., approximately 9,357 feet short of the runway. After several more impacts with trees and, finally, the ground, T.W.A. Flight 128 comes to rest 6,878 feet from the runway. There it bursts into flames. The people in the few nearby houses hear nothing unusual, though minutes later they will hear the sirens and then imagine having heard a boom, taking possession of the disaster. As the airplane tumbled, Ted Martin and Emma Brady both flashed on their respective families, onto Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, onto Greg, Peter, and Bobby, onto Carol, onto Mike, a single all-encompassing thought that contained a world within a world where the two of them were forever missing. But that quickly passed. For now, in this world, they were alone, staring at each other, almost calm, their unforgotten hearts gripped by the fall. From the voice recorder, we know the captain’s final words: “Come on, you,” he said, trying to strain his arms into wings.

You are lonely, but you don’t have to be. You have so many great qualities! Just think of all the single ladies out there who are waiting to hear from you. Whether you are looking for lasting love or just a little fun, this is the only guide to online dating you’ll ever need. Within the hour, you’ll be on your way to eternal happiness! Let’s get started. When creating your username keep in mind that it should be concise and easy to remember. Make it personal. If you’re a dancer maybe try: hipdancer21. Find me at cyclops15. Cyclops 1-14 were taken. Now choose a tagline that will attract the woman you want. Secret: Do what no one else is doing. I’m eight feet tall and I have one giant eye. What are your interests? Be honest but enticing. I handsew my own shoes using a needle made from the fang of a wolf. I sleep hot. I want nothing more than a sheet on my bed, even in winter, even in a cave. Know who your target is. Where does she live? What does she look like? What hobbies does she have? I like fat girls, old girls, tall girls, tired girls. Girls who lack adequate clothing, girls whose best idea for getting my attention is to send a photo of themselves holding suggestive Popsicles, their fists covered in red melt. Girls in wheelchairs, girls who work professionally at the Renaissance Faire. You could choose other men: men who like to think about feet, men who have thick back hair, men whose greatest pride is the time they flew to a nearby nation and tried to deplete its stores of alcohol and slept on the beach one night—wasn’t that so fun?—and when they woke up everything had been stolen or lost and they had to walk back to the pastel-yellow hotel naked in the early heat of another day in paradise. Everyone has had good times. Everyone has a picture of himself in front of a pinkening sunset with a glass of white wine. Choose them, if you want to. Choose me if you want someone to hold you above his head in the moonlight, bite your wrist until the first rust comes out. Tell the ladies a little more about yourself! What’s your own unique story? The first generation of Cyclops were forgers. The next generation, my generation, was a band of thuggish shepherds living in the grasslands of Sicily. We trapped so-called “heroes” in our caves, we bit into the warm butter of a human leg, but the only one who got famous for it was my brother. We still live under volcanoes, hacking at iron, trying to revive the old tradition. I left home—too hot, too old—and live in Washington State. I like the fog, I like the rain. My volcano is more famous than any of my brothers’ volcanoes. I never hear from them. They’re not on e-mail. I teach online English classes, not to get paid but because I like to feel smarter than someone else. I teach all the classic books, except the Odyssey. My photos are taken in profile. Maybe there’s time to get braver, to embrace my own unique beauty. I subscribe to the magazines that tell me we are all beautiful, if only we can learn to tap into our potential; I am me and no one else is me, and that is a miracle. I am a miracle. The downside: my mother has been dead for some hundreds of years, so you’ll never meet her. The upside: my father is the god of the sea, so we can guarantee good weather on our honeymoon cruise. He’s shitty at love, my dad. He smells like an overcleaned wound, and he won’t quit working. Every day and every night somewhere in one of the world’s oceans my father is striking the surface of the abyss with swords of fire. Do you smoke? Do you drink? How often do you exercise? Do you support charities that help animals? With an unexpected bonus would you (a) donate to a cause you really believe in? (b) save half and spend the rest? (c) celebrate with your friends and margaritas? If you want me to set a trap, I’ll set a trap. A first date picking blueberries in the whitest, cleanest sunlight, tin pails. I’ll bring sandwiches and chilled Chardonnay and tell you that we are already the good people we wanted to become. Maybe you’ll be generous and keep up the conversation all afternoon. Prettykaren98 was generous. Prettykaren98 looked into my eye when we chatted online and laughed at my jokes. But she never answered my messages after our date even though her status was still marked Single. Don’t mention your previous relationship history! Leave your emotional baggage packed and in the closet. You are on the market because you are awesome! Sorry. Let’s try that again. My actual perfect day? Descending belowground early, full of milk and blood and meat, to forge iron. There is no such thing as day or night in the volcano, and any sense of time comes from watching the metal change shape. From ore to spear. From ore to trident. From ore to thunderbolt. If I am strong that day, the mountains will shake with the strike of my hammer, the heat of my flame. I can’t ski. I should be better at basketball than I am. I don’t eat vegetables. But my eye is blue, and it’s pale and it’s beautiful. My vision is good, though not great, but understand this: I will never again visit an ophthalmologist or an optometrist or anyone else who claims to be an expert of my organ. I do not fit in the chair, and I wish I could forget lying on my back on the floor of that darkened room while a small man climbed onto my chest with that sharp point of light. I’m not sorry for what I did to him. Now he can see for himself what it’s like to have one eye. You have almost finished creating a magnetic online-dating profile that will attract more women than you ever thought possible! What else do you want the ladies to know? Remember: be yourself! I do remember the old feeling sometimes. A maiden washes up on my island, tailed or otherwise. The cave is sweating and there are mineral stalks growing from the ceiling. I have no idea what time it is, ever. All my wrist and ankle shackles are homemade, struck from iron I myself dug from the earth. The maidens were not as beautiful as the stories tell you—their hair was salt-stringy and their faces were pruned. Too long in seawater can unmake any loveliness. Yet I meant to love them. I meant to tend to their wounds. When I pounded the shackles with my hammer, the person I imagined chaining was my father. I imagined slipping the disks around his watery arms. Not to hurt him, but to keep him. But my father never offered himself up on my rocky beach. I’d see his big hand out there sometimes, swilling the surface of the sea, but he never came close. Maybe he was the one who threw the maidens to me, his dear son, his wifeless boy, wanting an heir. I will not shackle your slender wrists to the cold walls or gnaw your nails down to the quick with my remaining teeth. I will not leave you hungry while I eat a roast goat at your feet. I’ve dealt with those issues. Imagine the inverse: I have the softest mattress in the world, made of the combed fur of fawns; choose me and you’ll be choosing warm oil on your hands and cold water in your glass, meat on your plate from a lamb that suckled on my pinkie when it was first born. If I came to your house tonight, where would I find you? The living room? The kitchen? Waiting at the door? I’ll call you Aphrodite and smell the sea in your hair and shuck oysters for you from the depths. I’ll tell you that I’ve never seen a real goddess until now. Come with me and be adored, deep below the earth. While you sleep, I will strike a huge sheet of metal until the shape of your body comes into relief. You never have to take me to meet your friends; you never have to take me anywhere. You never even have to see me in the light. Your grandmother will tell you that all the good men are gone, but then here I am, and I’m ready for you.

As far as I know, the only person ever to put Japanese lyrics to the Beatles song “Yesterday” (and to do so in the distinctive Kansai dialect, no less) was a guy named Kitaru. He used to belt out his own version when he was taking a bath. Yesterday Is two days before tomorrow, The day after two days ago. This is how it began, as I recall, but I haven’t heard it for a long time and I’m not positive that’s how it went. From start to finish, though, Kitaru’s lyrics were almost meaningless, nonsense that had nothing to do with the original words. That familiar lovely, melancholy melody paired with the breezy Kansai dialect—which you might call the opposite of pathos—made for a strange combination, a bold denial of anything constructive. At least, that’s how it sounded to me. At the time, I just listened and shook my head. I was able to laugh it off, but I also read a kind of hidden import in it. I first met Kitaru at a coffee shop near the main gate of Waseda University, where we worked part time, I in the kitchen and Kitaru as a waiter. We used to talk a lot during downtime at the shop. We were both twenty, our birthdays only a week apart. “Kitaru is an unusual last name,” I said one day. “Yeah, for sure,” Kitaru replied in his heavy Kansai accent. “The Lotte baseball team had a pitcher with the same name.” “The two of us aren’t related. Not so common a name, though, so who knows? Maybe there’s a connection somewhere.” I was a sophomore at Waseda then, in the literature department. Kitaru had failed the entrance exam and was attending a prep course to cram for the retake. He’d failed the exam twice, actually, but you wouldn’t have guessed it by the way he acted. He didn’t seem to put much effort into studying. When he was free, he read a lot, but nothing related to the exam—a biography of Jimi Hendrix, books of shogi problems, “Where Did the Universe Come From?,” and the like. He told me that he commuted to the cram school from his parents’ place in Ota Ward, in Tokyo. “Ota Ward?” I asked, astonished. “But I was sure you were from Kansai.” “No way. Denenchofu, born and bred.” This really threw me. “Then how come you speak Kansai dialect?” I asked. “I acquired it. Just made up my mind to learn it.” “Acquired it?” “Yeah, I studied hard, see? Verbs, nouns, accent—the whole nine yards. Same as studying English or French. Went to Kansai for training, even.” So there were people who studied Kansai dialect as if it were a foreign language? That was news to me. It made me realize all over again how huge Tokyo was, and how many things there were that I didn’t know. Reminded me of the novel “Sanshiro,” a typical country-boy-bumbles-his-way-around-the-big-city story. “As a kid, I was a huge Hanshin Tigers fan,” Kitaru explained. “Went to their games whenever they played in Tokyo. But if I sat in the Hanshin bleachers and spoke with a Tokyo dialect nobody wanted to have anything to do with me. Couldn’t be part of the community, y’know? So I figured, I gotta learn Kansai dialect, and I worked like a dog to do just that.” “That was your motivation?” I could hardly believe it. “Right. That’s how much the Tigers mean to me,” Kitaru said. “Now Kansai dialect’s all I speak—at school, at home, even when I talk in my sleep. My dialect’s near perfect, don’t you think?” “Absolutely. I was positive you were from Kansai,” I said. “If I’d put as much effort into studying for the entrance exams as I did into studying Kansai dialect, I wouldn’t be a two-time loser like I am now.” He had a point. Even his self-directed putdown was kind of Kansai-like. “So where’re you from?” he asked. “Kansai. Near Kobe,” I said. “Near Kobe? Where?” “Ashiya,” I replied. “Wow, nice place. Why didn’t you say so from the start?” I explained. When people asked me where I was from and I said Ashiya, they always assumed that my family was wealthy. But there were all types in Ashiya. My family, for one, wasn’t particularly well off. My dad worked for a pharmaceutical company and my mom was a librarian. Our house was small and our car a cream-colored Corolla. So when people asked me where I was from I always said “near Kobe,” so they didn’t get any preconceived ideas about me. “Man, sounds like you and me are the same,” Kitaru said. “My address is Denenchofu—a pretty high-class place—but my house is in the shabbiest part of town. Shabby house as well. You should come over sometime. You’ll be, like, Wha’? This is Denenchofu? No way! But worrying about something like that makes no sense, yeah? It’s just an address. I do the opposite—hit ’em right up front with the fact that I’m from Den-en-cho-fu. Like, how d’you like that, huh?” I was impressed. And after this we became friends. Until I graduated from high school, I spoke nothing but Kansai dialect. But all it took was a month in Tokyo for me to become completely fluent in Tokyo standard. I was kind of surprised that I could adapt so quickly. Maybe I have a chameleon type of personality. Or maybe my sense of language is more advanced than most people’s. Either way, no one believed now that I was actually from Kansai. Another reason I stopped using Kansai dialect was that I wanted to become a totally different person. When I moved from Kansai to Tokyo to start college, I spent the whole bullet-train ride mentally reviewing my eighteen years and realized that almost everything that had happened to me was pretty embarrassing. I’m not exaggerating. I didn’t want to remember any of it—it was so pathetic. The more I thought about my life up to then, the more I hated myself. It wasn’t that I didn’t have a few good memories—I did. A handful of happy experiences. But, if you added them up, the shameful, painful memories far outnumbered the others. When I thought of how I’d been living, how I’d been approaching life, it was all so trite, so miserably pointless. Unimaginative middle-class rubbish, and I wanted to gather it all up and stuff it away in some drawer. Or else light it on fire and watch it go up in smoke (though what kind of smoke it would emit I had no idea). Anyway, I wanted to get rid of it all and start a new life in Tokyo as a brand-new person. Jettisoning Kansai dialect was a practical (as well as symbolic) method of accomplishing this. Because, in the final analysis, the language we speak constitutes who we are as people. At least that’s the way it seemed to me at eighteen. “Embarrassing? What was so embarrassing?” Kitaru asked me. “You name it.” “Didn’t get along with your folks?” “We get along O.K.,” I said. “But it was still embarrassing. Just being with them made me feel embarrassed.” “You’re weird, y’know that?” Kitaru said. “What’s so embarrassing about being with your folks? I have a good time with mine.” “There’s a life lesson here, kid. Not all bad guys look like bad guys, and not all good guys look like good guys.”Buy the print » I couldn’t really explain it. What’s so bad about having a cream-colored Corolla? I couldn’t say. My parents weren’t interested in spending money for the sake of appearances, that’s all. “My parents are on my case all the time ’cause I don’t study enough. I hate it, but whaddaya gonna do? That’s their job. You gotta look past that, y’know?” “You’re pretty easygoing, aren’t you?” I said. “You got a girl?” Kitaru asked. “Not right now.” “But you had one before?” “Until a little while ago.” “You guys broke up?” “That’s right,” I said. “Why’d you break up?” “It’s a long story. I don’t want to get into it.” “She let you go all the way?” I shook my head. “No, not all the way.” “That’s why you broke up?” I thought about it. “That’s part of it.” “But she let you get to third base?” “Rounding third base.” “How far’d you go, exactly?” “I don’t want to talk about it,” I said. “Is that one of those embarrassing things you mentioned?” “Yeah,” I said. “Man, complicated life you got there,” Kitaru said. The first time I heard Kitaru sing “Yesterday” with those crazy lyrics he was in the bath at his house in Denenchofu (which, despite his description, was not a shabby house in a shabby neighborhood but an ordinary house in an ordinary neighborhood, an older house, but bigger than my house in Ashiya, not a standout in any way—and, incidentally, the car in the driveway was a navy-blue Golf, a recent model). Whenever Kitaru came home, he immediately dropped everything and jumped in the bath. And, once he was in the tub, he stayed there forever. So I would often lug a little round stool to the adjacent changing room and sit there, talking to him through the sliding door that was open an inch or so. That was the only way to avoid listening to his mother drone on and on (mostly complaints about her weird son and how he needed to study more). “Those lyrics don’t make any sense,” I told him. “It just sounds like you’re making fun of the song ‘Yesterday.’ ” “Don’t be a smart-ass. I’m not making fun of it. Even if I was, you gotta remember that John loved nonsense and word games. Right?” “But Paul’s the one who wrote the words and music for ‘Yesterday.’ ” “You sure about that?” “Absolutely,” I declared. “Paul wrote the song and recorded it by himself in the studio with a guitar. A string quartet was added later, but the other Beatles weren’t involved at all. They thought it was too wimpy for a Beatles song.” “Really? I’m not up on that kind of privileged information.” “It’s not privileged information. It’s a well-known fact,” I said. “Who cares? Those are just details,” Kitaru’s voice said calmly from a cloud of steam. “I’m singing in the bath in my own house. Not putting out a record or anything. I’m not violating any copyright, or bothering a soul. You’ve got no right to complain.” And he launched into the chorus, his voice carrying loud and clear. He hit the high notes especially well. I could hear him lightly splashing the bathwater as an accompaniment. I probably should have sung along to encourage him, but I just couldn’t bring myself to. Sitting there, talking through a glass door to keep him company while he soaked in the tub for an hour wasn’t all that much fun. “But how can you spend so long soaking in the bath?” I asked. “Doesn’t your body get all swollen?” “When I soak in a bath for a long time, all kinds of good ideas come to me,” Kitaru said. “You mean like those lyrics to ‘Yesterday’?” “Well, that’d be one of them,” Kitaru said. “Instead of spending so much time thinking up ideas in the bath, shouldn’t you be studying for the entrance exam?” I asked. “Jeez, aren’t you a downer. My mom says exactly the same thing. Aren’t you a little young to be, like, the voice of wisdom or something?” “But you’ve been cramming for two years. Aren’t you getting tired of it?” “For sure. Of course I wanna be in college as soon as I can.” “Then why not study harder?” “Yeah—well,” he said, drawing the words out. “If I could do that, I’d be doing it already.” “College is a drag,” I said. “I was totally disappointed once I got in. But not getting in would be even more of a drag.” “Fair enough,” Kitaru said. “I got no comeback for that.” “So why don’t you study?” “Lack of motivation,” he said. “Motivation?” I said. “Shouldn’t being able to go out on dates with your girlfriend be good motivation?” There was a girl Kitaru had known since they were in elementary school together. A childhood girlfriend, you could say. They’d been in the same grade in school, but unlike him she had got into Sophia University straight out of high school. She was now majoring in French literature and had joined the tennis club. He’d shown me a photograph of her, and she was stunning. A beautiful figure and a lively expression. But the two of them weren’t seeing each other much these days. They’d talked it over and decided that it was better not to date until Kitaru had passed the entrance exams, so that he could focus on his studies. Kitaru had been the one who suggested this. “O.K.,” she’d said, “if that’s what you want.” They talked on the phone a lot but met at most once a week, and those meetings were more like interviews than regular dates. They’d have tea and catch up on what they’d each been doing. They’d hold hands and exchange a brief kiss, but that was as far as it went. Kitaru wasn’t what you’d call handsome, but he was pleasant-looking enough. He was slim, and his hair and clothes were simple and stylish. As long as he didn’t say anything, you’d assume he was a sensitive, well-brought-up city boy. His only possible defect was that his face, a bit too slender and delicate, could give the impression that he was lacking in personality or was wishy-washy. But the moment he opened his mouth this over-all positive effect collapsed like a sandcastle under an exuberant Labrador retriever. People were dismayed by his Kansai dialect, which he delivered, as if that weren’t enough, in a slightly piercing, high-pitched voice. The mismatch with his looks was overwhelming; even for me it was, at first, a little too much to handle. “Hey, Tanimura, aren’t you lonely without a girlfriend?” Kitaru asked me the next day. “I don’t deny it,” I told him. “Then how about you go out with my girl?” I couldn’t understand what he meant. “What do you mean—go out with her?” “She’s a great girl. Pretty, honest, smart like all getout. You go out with her, you won’t regret it. I guarantee it.” “I’m sure I wouldn’t,” I said. “But why would I go out with your girlfriend? It doesn’t make sense.” “ ’Cause you’re a good guy,” Kitaru said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t suggest it. Erika and I have spent almost our whole lives together so far. We sort of naturally became a couple, and everybody around us approved. Our friends, our parents, our teachers. A tight little couple, always together.” Kitaru clasped his hands to illustrate. Buy the print » “If we’d both gone straight into college, our lives would’ve been all warm and fuzzy, but I blew the entrance exam big time, and here we are. I’m not sure why, exactly, but things kept on getting worse. I’m not blaming anyone for that—it’s all my fault.” I listened to him in silence. “So I kinda split myself in two,” Kitaru said. He pulled his hands apart. “How so?” I asked. He stared at his palms for a moment and then spoke. “What I mean is part of me’s, like, worried, y’know? I mean, I’m going to some fricking cram school, studying for the fricking entrance exams, while Erika’s having a ball in college. Playing tennis, doing whatever. She’s got new friends, is probably dating some new guy, for all I know. When I think of all that, I feel left behind. Like my mind’s in a fog. You know what I mean?” “I guess so,” I said. “But another part of me is, like—relieved? If we’d just kept going like we were, with no problems or anything, a nice couple smoothly sailing through life, it’s like . . . we graduate from college, get married, we’re this wonderful married couple everybody’s happy about, we have the typical two kids, put ’em in the good old Denenchofu elementary school, go out to the Tama River banks on Sundays, Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da . . . I’m not saying that kinda life’s bad. But I wonder, y’know, if life should really be that easy, that comfortable. It might be better to go our separate ways for a while, and if we find out that we really can’t get along without each other, then we get back together.” “So you’re saying that things being smooth and comfortable is a problem. Is that it?” “Yeah, that’s about the size of it.” “But why do I have to go out with your girlfriend?” I asked. “I figure, if she’s gonna go out with other guys, it’s better if it’s you. ’Cause I know you. And you can gimme, like, updates and stuff.” That didn’t make any sense to me, though I admit I was interested in the idea of meeting Erika. I also wanted to find out why a beautiful girl like her would want to go out with a weird character like Kitaru. I’ve always been a little shy around new people, but I never lack curiosity. “How far have you gone with her?” I asked. “You mean sex?” Kitaru said. “Yeah. Have you gone all the way?” Kitaru shook his head. “I just couldn’t, see? I’ve known her since she was a kid, and it’s kinda embarrassing, y’know, to act like we’re just starting out, and take her clothes off, fondle her, touch her, whatever. If it were some other girl, I don’t think I’d have a problem, but putting my hand in her underpants, even just thinking about doing it with her—I dunno—it just seems wrong. You know?” I didn’t. “I can’t explain it well,” Kitaru said. “Like, when you’re jerking off, you picture some actual girl, yeah?” “I suppose,” I said. “But I can’t picture Erika. It’s like doing that’s wrong, y’know? So when I do it I think about some other girl. Somebody I don’t really like that much. Whaddya think?” I thought it over but couldn’t reach any conclusion. Other people’s masturbation habits were beyond me. There were things about my own that I couldn’t fathom. “Anyway, let’s all get together once, the three of us,” Kitaru said. “Then you can think it over.” The three of us—me, Kitaru, and his girlfriend, whose full name was Erika Kuritani—met on a Sunday afternoon in a coffee shop near Denenchofu Station. She was almost as tall as Kitaru, nicely tanned, and decked out in a neatly ironed short-sleeved white blouse and navy-blue miniskirt. Like the perfect model of a respectable uptown college girl. She was as attractive as in her photograph, but what really drew me in person was less her looks than the kind of effortless vitality that seemed to radiate from her. She was the opposite of Kitaru, who paled a bit in comparison. “I’m really happy that Aki-kun has a friend,” Erika told me. Kitaru’s first name was Akiyoshi. She was the only person in the world who called him Aki-kun. “Don’t exaggerate. I got tons of friends,” Kitaru said. “No, you don’t,” Erika said. “A person like you can’t make friends. You were born in Tokyo, yet all you speak is Kansai dialect, and every time you open your mouth it’s one annoying thing after another about the Hanshin Tigers or shogi moves. There’s no way a weird person like you can get along well with normal people.” “Well, if you’re gonna get into that, this guy’s pretty weird, too.” Kitaru pointed at me. “He’s from Ashiya but only speaks Tokyo dialect.” “That’s much more common,” Erika said. “At least more common than the opposite.” “Hold on, now—that’s cultural discrimination,” Kitaru said. “Cultures are all equal, y’know. Tokyo dialect’s no better than Kansai.” “Maybe they are equal,” Erika said, “but since the Meiji Restoration the way people speak in Tokyo has been the standard for spoken Japanese. I mean, has anyone ever translated ‘Franny and Zooey’ into Kansai dialect?” “If they did, I’d buy it, for sure,” Kitaru said. I probably would, too, I thought, but kept quiet. Wisely, instead of being dragged deeper into that discussion, Erika Kuritani changed the subject. “There’s a girl in my tennis club who’s from Ashiya, too,” she said, turning to me. “Eiko Sakurai. Do you happen to know her?” “I do,” I said. Eiko Sakurai was a tall, gangly girl, whose parents operated a large golf course. Stuck-up, flat-chested, with a funny-looking nose and a none too wonderful personality. Tennis was the one thing she’d always been good at. If I never saw her again, it would be too soon for me. “He’s a nice guy, and he hasn’t got a girlfriend right now,” Kitaru said to Erika. “His looks are O.K., he has good manners, and he knows all kinds of things. He’s neat and clean, as you can see, and doesn’t have any terrible diseases. A promising young man, I’d say.” “All right,” Erika said. “There are some really cute new members of our club I’d be happy to introduce him to.” “Nah, that’s not what I mean,” Kitaru said. “Could you go out with him? I’m not in college yet and I can’t go out with you the way I’d like to. Instead of me, you could go out with him. And then I wouldn’t have to worry.” “What do you mean, you wouldn’t have to worry?” Erika asked. “I mean, like, I know both of you, and I’d feel better if you went out with him instead of some guy I’ve never laid eyes on.” Erika stared at Kitaru as if she couldn’t quite believe what she was seeing. Finally, she spoke. “So you’re saying it’s O.K. for me to go out with another guy if it’s Tanimura-kun here? You’re seriously suggesting we go out, on a date?” “Hey, it’s not such a terrible idea, is it? Or are you already going out with some other guy?” “No, there’s no one else,” Erika said in a quiet voice. “Then why not go out with him? It can be a kinda cultural exchange.” “Cultural exchange,” Erika repeated. She looked at me. “O.K.—let’s get our stories straight, and our characters sympathetic and well drawn.”Buy the print » It didn’t seem as though anything I said would help, so I kept silent. I held my coffee spoon in my hand, studying the design on it, like a museum curator scrutinizing an artifact from an Egyptian tomb. “Cultural exchange? What’s that supposed to mean?” she asked Kitaru. “Like, bringing in another viewpoint might not be so bad for us . . .” “That’s your idea of cultural exchange?” “Yeah, what I mean is . . .” “All right,” Erika Kuritani said firmly. If there had been a pencil nearby, I might have picked it up and snapped it in two. “If you think we should do it, Aki-kun, then O.K. Let’s do a cultural exchange.” She took a sip of tea, returned the cup to the saucer, turned to me, and smiled. “Since Aki-kun has recommended we do this, Tanimura-kun, let’s go on a date. Sounds like fun. When are you free?” I couldn’t speak. Not being able to find the right words at crucial times is one of my many problems. Erika took a red leather planner from her bag, opened it, and checked her schedule. “How is this Saturday?” she asked. “I have no plans,” I said. “Saturday it is, then. Where shall we go?” “He likes movies,” Kitaru told her. “His dream is to write screenplays someday.” “Then let’s go see a movie. What kind of movie should we see? I’ll let you decide that, Tanimura-kun. I don’t like horror films, but, other than that, anything’s fine.” “She’s really a scaredy-cat,” Kitaru said to me. “When we were kids and went to the haunted house at Korakuen, she had to hold my hand and—” “After the movie let’s have a nice meal together,” Erika said, cutting him off. She wrote her phone number down on a sheet from her notebook and passed it to me. “When you decide the time and place, could you give me a call?” I didn’t have a phone back then (this was long before cell phones were even a glimmer on the horizon), so I gave her the number for the coffee shop where Kitaru and I worked. I glanced at my watch. “I’m sorry but I’ve got to get going,” I said, as cheerfully as I could manage. “I have this report I have to finish up by tomorrow.” “Can’t it wait?” Kitaru said. “We only just got here. Why don’t you stay so we can talk some more? There’s a great noodle shop right around the corner.” Erika didn’t express an opinion. I put the money for my coffee on the table and stood up. “It’s an important report,” I explained, “so I really can’t put it off.” Actually, it didn’t matter all that much. “I’ll call you tomorrow or the day after,” I told Erika. “I’ll be looking forward to it,” she said, a wonderful smile rising to her lips. A smile that, to me at least, seemed a little too good to be true. I left the coffee shop and as I walked to the station I wondered what the hell I was doing. Brooding over how things had turned out—after everything had already been decided—was another of my chronic problems. That Saturday, Erika and I met in Shibuya and saw a Woody Allen film set in New York. Somehow I’d got the sense that she might be fond of Woody Allen movies. And I was pretty sure that Kitaru had never taken her to see one. Luckily, it was a good movie, and we were both feeling cheerful when we left the theatre. We strolled around the twilight streets for a while, then went to a small Italian place in Sakuragaoka and had pizza and Chianti. It was a casual, moderately priced restaurant. Subdued lighting, candles on the tables. (Most Italian restaurants at the time had candles on the tables and checked gingham tablecloths.) We talked about all kinds of things, the sort of conversation you’d expect two college sophomores on a first date to have (assuming you could actually call this a date). The movie we’d just seen, our college life, hobbies. We enjoyed talking more than I’d expected, and she even laughed out loud a couple of times. I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging, but I seem to have a knack for getting girls to laugh. “I heard from Aki-kun that you broke up with your high-school girlfriend not long ago?” Erika asked me. “Yeah,” I replied. “We went out for almost three years, but it didn’t work out. Unfortunately.” “Aki-kun said things didn’t work out with her because of sex. That she didn’t—how should I put it?—give you what you wanted?” “That was part of it. But not all. If I’d really loved her, I think I could have been patient. If I’d been sure that I loved her, I mean. But I wasn’t.” Erika nodded. “Even if we’d gone all the way, things most likely would have ended up the same,” I said. “I think it was inevitable.” “Is it hard on you?” she asked. “Is what hard?” “Suddenly being on your own after being a couple.” “Sometimes,” I said honestly. “But maybe going through that kind of tough, lonely experience is necessary when you’re young? Part of the process of growing up?” “You think so?” “The way surviving hard winters makes a tree grow stronger, the growth rings inside it tighter.” I tried to imagine growth rings inside me. But the only thing I could picture was a leftover slice of Baumkuchen cake, the kind with treelike rings inside it. “I agree that people need that sort of period in their lives,” I said. “It’s even better if they know that it’ll end someday.” She smiled. “Don’t worry. I know you’ll meet somebody nice soon.” “I hope so,” I said. Erika mulled over something while I helped myself to the pizza. “Tanimura-kun, I wanted to ask your advice on something. Is it O.K.?” “Sure,” I said. This was another problem I often had to deal with: people I’d just met wanting my advice about something important. And I was pretty sure that what Erika wanted my advice about wasn’t very pleasant. “I’m confused,” she began. Her eyes shifted back and forth, like those of a cat in search of something. “I’m sure you know this already, but though Aki-kun’s in his second year of cramming for the entrance exams, he barely studies. He skips exam-prep school a lot, too. So I’m sure he’ll fail again next year. If he aimed for a lower-tier school, he could get in somewhere, but he has his heart set on Waseda. He doesn’t listen to me, or to his parents. It’s become like an obsession for him. . . . But if he really feels that way he should study hard so that he can pass the Waseda exam, and he doesn’t.” “Why doesn’t he study more?” “He truly believes that he’ll pass the entrance exam if luck is on his side,” Erika said. “That studying is a waste of time.” She sighed and went on, “In elementary school he was always at the top of his class academically. But once he got to junior high his grades started to slide. He was a bit of a child prodigy—his personality just isn’t suited to the daily grind of studying. He’d rather go off and do crazy things on his own. I’m the exact opposite. I’m not all that bright, but I always buckle down and get the job done.” “He looks so natural.”Buy the print » I hadn’t studied very hard myself and had got into college on the first try. Maybe luck had been on my side. “I’m very fond of Aki-kun,” she continued. “He’s got a lot of wonderful qualities. But sometimes it’s hard for me to go along with his extreme way of thinking. Take this thing with Kansai dialect. Why does somebody who was born and raised in Tokyo go to the trouble of learning Kansai dialect and speak it all the time? I don’t get it, I really don’t. At first I thought it was a joke, but it isn’t. He’s dead serious.” “I think he wants to have a different personality, to be somebody different from who he’s been up till now,” I said. “That’s why he only speaks Kansai dialect?” “I agree with you that it’s a radical way of dealing with it.” Erika picked up a slice of pizza and bit off a piece the size of a large postage stamp. She chewed it thoughtfully before she spoke. “Tanimura-kun, I’m asking this because I don’t have anyone else to ask. You don’t mind?” “Of course not,” I said. What else could I say? “As a general rule,” she said, “when a guy and a girl go out for a long time and get to know each other really well, the guy has a physical interest in the girl, right?” “As a general rule, I’d say so, yes.” “If they kiss, he’ll want to go further?” “Normally, sure.” “You feel that way, too?” “Of course,” I said. “But Aki-kun doesn’t. When we’re alone, he doesn’t want to go any further.” It took a while for me to choose the right words. “That’s a personal thing,” I said finally. “People have different ways of getting what they want. Kitaru likes you a lot—that’s a given—but your relationship is so close and comfortable he may not be able to take things to the next level, the way most people do.” “You really think so?” I shook my head. “To tell the truth, I don’t really understand it. I’ve never experienced it myself. I’m just saying that could be one possibility.” “Sometimes it feels like he doesn’t have any sexual desire for me.” “I’m sure he does. But it might be a little embarrassing for him to admit it.” “But we’re twenty, adults already. Old enough not to be embarrassed.” “Some people might mature a little faster than others,” I said. Erika thought about this. She seemed to be the type who always tackles things head on. “I think Kitaru is honestly seeking something,” I went on. “In his own way, at his own pace. It’s just that I don’t think he’s grasped yet what it is. That’s why he can’t make any progress. If you don’t know what you’re looking for, it’s not easy to look for it.” Erika raised her head and stared me right in the eye. The candle flame was reflected in her dark eyes, a small, brilliant point of light. It was so beautiful I had to look away. “Of course, you know him much better than I do,” I averred. She sighed again. “Actually, I’m seeing another guy besides Aki-kun,” she said. “A boy in my tennis club who’s a year ahead of me.” It was my turn to remain silent. “I truly love Aki-kun, and I don’t think I could ever feel the same way about anybody else. Whenever I’m away from him I get this terrible ache in my chest, always in the same spot. It’s true. There’s a place in my heart reserved just for him. But at the same time I have this strong urge inside me to try something else, to come into contact with all kinds of people. Call it curiosity, a thirst to know more. It’s a natural emotion and I can’t suppress it, no matter how much I try.” I pictured a healthy plant outgrowing the pot it had been planted in. “When I say I’m confused, that’s what I mean,” Erika said. “Then you should tell Kitaru exactly how you feel,” I said. “If you hide it from him that you’re seeing someone else, and he happens to find out anyway, it’ll hurt him. You don’t want that.” “But can he accept that? The fact that I’m going out with someone else?” “I imagine he’ll understand how you feel,” I said. “You think so?” “I do,” I said. I figured that Kitaru would understand her confusion, because he was feeling the same thing. In that sense, they really were on the same wavelength. Still, I wasn’t entirely confident that he would calmly accept what she was actually doing (or might be doing). He didn’t seem that strong a person to me. But it would be even harder for him if she kept a secret from him or lied to him. Erika stared at the candle flame flickering in the breeze from the A.C. “I often have the same dream,” she said. “Aki-kun and I are on a ship. A long journey on a large ship. We’re together in a small cabin, it’s late at night, and through the porthole we can see the full moon. But that moon is made of pure, transparent ice. And the bottom half of it is sunk in the sea. ‘That looks like the moon,’ Aki-kun tells me, ‘but it’s really made of ice and is only about eight inches thick. So when the sun comes out in the morning it all melts. You should get a good look at it now, while you have the chance.’ I’ve had this dream so many times. It’s a beautiful dream. Always the same moon. Always eight inches thick. I’m leaning against Aki-kun, it’s just the two of us, the waves lapping gently outside. But every time I wake up I feel unbearably sad.” Erika Kuritani was silent for a time. Then she spoke again. “I think how wonderful it would be if Aki-kun and I could continue on that voyage forever. Every night we’d snuggle close and gaze out the porthole at that moon made of ice. Come morning the moon would melt away, and at night it would reappear. But maybe that’s not the case. Maybe one night the moon wouldn’t be there. It scares me to think that. I get so frightened it’s like I can actually feel my body shrinking.” When I saw Kitaru at the coffee shop the next day, he asked me how the date had gone. “You kiss her?” “No way,” I said. “Don’t worry—I’m not gonna freak if you did,” he said. “I didn’t do anything like that.” “Didn’t hold her hand?” “No, I didn’t hold her hand.” “So what’d you do?” “We went to see a movie, took a walk, had dinner, and talked,” I said. “That’s it?” “Usually you don’t try to move too fast on a first date.” “Really?” Kitaru said. “I never been out on a regular date, so I don’t know.” “But I enjoyed being with her. If she were my girlfriend, I’d never let her out of my sight.” Kitaru considered this. He was about to say something but thought better of it. “So what’d you eat?” he asked finally. I told him about the pizza and the Chianti. “Does your client wish to plead ‘sweet’ or ‘lame’?”September 26, 2011Buy the print » “Pizza and Chianti?” He sounded surprised. “I never knew she liked pizza. We’ve only been to, like, noodle shops and cheap diners. Wine? I didn’t even know she could drink.” Kitaru never touched liquor himself. “There are probably quite a few things you don’t know about her,” I said. I answered all his questions about the date. About the Woody Allen film (at his insistence I reviewed the whole plot), the meal (how much the bill came to, whether we split it or not), what she had on (white cotton dress, hair pinned up), what kind of underwear she wore (how would I know that?), what we talked about. I said nothing about her going out with another guy. Nor did I mention her dreams of an icy moon. “You guys decide when you’ll have a second date?” “No, we didn’t,” I said. “Why not? You liked her, didn’t you?” “She’s great. But we can’t go on like this. I mean, she’s your girlfriend, right? You say it’s O.K. to kiss her, but there’s no way I can do that.” More pondering by Kitaru. “Y’know something?” he said finally. “I’ve been seeing a therapist since the end of junior high. My parents and teachers, they all said to go to one. ’Cause I used to do things at school from time to time. Y’know—not normal kinda things. But going to a therapist hasn’t helped, far as I can see. It sounds good in theory, but therapists don’t give a crap. They look at you like they know what’s going on, then make you talk on and on and just listen. Man, I could do that.” “You’re still seeing a therapist?” “Yeah. Twice a month. Like throwing your money away, if you ask me. Erika didn’t tell you about it?” I shook my head. “Tell you the truth, I don’t know what’s so weird about my way of thinking. To me, it seems like I’m just doing ordinary things in an ordinary way. But people tell me that almost everything I do is weird.” “Well, there are some things about you that are definitely not normal,” I said. “Like what?” “Like your Kansai dialect.” “You could be right,” Kitaru admitted. “That is a little out of the ordinary.” “Normal people wouldn’t take things that far.” “Yeah, you’re probably right.” “But, as far as I can tell, even if what you do isn’t normal, it’s not bothering anybody.” “Not right now.” “So what’s wrong with that?” I said. I might have been a little upset then (at what or whom I couldn’t say). I could feel my tone getting rough around the edges. “If you’re not bothering anybody, then so what? You want to speak Kansai dialect, then you should. Go for it. You don’t want to study for the entrance exam? Then don’t. Don’t feel like sticking your hand inside Erika Kuritani’s panties? Who’s saying you have to? It’s your life. You should do what you want and forget about what other people think.” Kitaru, mouth slightly open, stared at me in amazement. “You know something, Tanimura? You’re a good guy. Though sometimes a little too normal, y’know?” “What’re you gonna do?” I said. “You can’t just change your personality.” “Exactly. You can’t change your personality. That’s what I’m tryin’ to say.” “But Erika is a great girl,” I said. “She really cares about you. Whatever you do, don’t let her go. You’ll never find such a great girl again.” “I know. You don’t gotta tell me,” Kitaru said. “But just knowing isn’t gonna help.” About two weeks later, Kitaru quit working at the coffee shop. I say quit, but he just suddenly stopped showing up. He didn’t get in touch, didn’t mention anything about taking time off. And this was during our busiest season, so the owner was pretty pissed. Kitaru was owed a week’s pay, but he didn’t come to pick it up. He simply vanished. I have to say it hurt me. I’d thought we were good friends, and it was tough to be cut off so completely like that. I didn’t have any other friends in Tokyo. The last two days before he disappeared, Kitaru was unusually quiet. He wouldn’t say much when I talked to him. And then he went and vanished. I could have called Erika Kuritani to check on his whereabouts, but somehow I couldn’t bring myself to. I figured that what went on between the two of them was their business, and that it wasn’t a healthy thing for me to get any more involved than I was. Somehow I had to get by in the narrow little world I belonged to. After all this happened, for some reason I kept thinking about my ex-girlfriend. Probably I’d felt something, seeing Kitaru and Erika together. I wrote her a long letter apologizing for how I’d behaved. I could have been a whole lot kinder to her. But I never got a reply. I recognized Erika Kuritani right away. I’d only seen her twice, and sixteen years had passed since then. But there was no mistaking her. She was still lovely, with the same lively, animated expression. She was wearing a black lace dress, with black high heels and two strands of pearls around her slim neck. She remembered me right away, too. We were at a wine-tasting party at a hotel in Akasaka. It was a black-tie event, and I had put on a dark suit and tie for the occasion. She was a rep for the advertising firm that was sponsoring the event, and was clearly doing a great job of handling it. It’d take too long to get into the reasons that I was there. “Tanimura-kun, how come you never got in touch with me after that night we went out?” she asked. “I was hoping we could talk some more.” “You were a little too beautiful for me,” I said. She smiled. “That’s nice to hear, even if you’re just flattering me.” But what I’d said was neither a lie nor flattery. She was too gorgeous for me to be seriously interested in her. Back then, and even now. “I called that coffee shop you used to work at, but they said you didn’t work there anymore,” she said. After Kitaru left, the job became a total bore, and I quit two weeks later. Erika and I briefly reviewed the lives we’d led over the past sixteen years. After college, I was hired by a small publisher, but quit after three years and had been a writer ever since. I got married at twenty-seven but didn’t have any children yet. Erika was still single. “They drive me so hard at work,” she joked, “that I have no time to get married.” She was the first one to bring up the topic of Kitaru. “Aki-kun is working as a sushi chef in Denver now,” she said. “Denver?” “Denver, Colorado. At least, according to the postcard he sent me a couple of months ago.” “Why Denver?” “I don’t know,” Erika said. “The postcard before that was from Seattle. He was a sushi chef there, too. That was about a year ago. He sends me postcards sporadically. Always some silly card with just a couple of lines dashed off. Sometimes he doesn’t even write his return address.” “A sushi chef,” I mused. “So he never did go to college?” “It’s 4 —maybe you’d sleep better if you bought some crap!”April 23, 2007Buy the print » She shook her head. “At the end of that summer, I think it was, he suddenly announced that he’d had it with studying for the entrance exams and he went off to a cooking school in Osaka. Said he really wanted to learn Kansai cuisine and go to games at Koshien Stadium, the Hanshin Tigers’ stadium. Of course, I asked him, ‘How can you decide something so important without even asking me? What about me?’ ” “And what did he say to that?” She didn’t respond. She just held her lips tight, as if she’d break into tears if she tried to speak. I quickly changed the subject. “When we went to that Italian restaurant in Shibuya, I remember we had cheap Chianti. Now look at us, tasting premium Napa wines. Kind of a strange twist of fate.” “I remember,” she said, pulling herself together. “We saw a Woody Allen movie. Which one was it again?” I told her. “That was a great movie.” I agreed. It was definitely one of Woody Allen’s masterpieces. “Did things work out with that guy in your tennis club you were seeing?” I asked. She shook her head. “No. We just didn’t connect the way I thought we would. We went out for six months and then broke up.” “Can I ask a question?” I said. “It’s very personal, though.” “Of course.” “I don’t want you to be offended.” “I’ll do my best.” “You slept with that guy, right?” Erika looked at me in surprise, her cheeks reddening. “Why are you bringing that up now?” “Good question,” I said. “It’s just been on my mind for a long time. But that was a weird thing to ask. I’m sorry.” Erika shook her head slightly. “No, it’s O.K. I’m not offended. I just wasn’t expecting it. It was all so long ago.” I looked around the room. People in formal wear were scattered about. Corks popped one after another from expensive bottles of wine. A female pianist was playing “Like Someone in Love.” “The answer is yes,” Erika said. “I had sex with him a number of times.” “Curiosity, a thirst to know more,” I said. She gave a hint of a smile. “That’s right. Curiosity, a thirst to know more.” “That’s how we develop our growth rings.” “If you say so,” she said. “And I’m guessing that the first time you slept with him was soon after we had our date in Shibuya?” She turned a page in her mental record book. “I think so. About a week after that. I remember that whole time pretty well. It was the first time for me.” “And Kitaru was pretty quick on the uptake,” I said, gazing into her eyes. She looked down and fingered the pearls on her necklace one by one, as if making sure that they were all still there. She gave a small sigh, perhaps remembering something. “Yes, you’re right about that. Aki-kun had a very strong sense of intuition.” “But it didn’t work out with the other man.” She nodded. “Unfortunately, I’m just not that smart. I needed to take the long way around. I always take a roundabout way.” That’s what we all do: endlessly take the long way around. I wanted to tell her this, but kept silent. Blurting out aphorisms like that was another one of my problems. “Is Kitaru married?” “As far as I know, he’s still single,” Erika said. “At least, he hasn’t told me that he got married. Maybe the two of us are the type who never make a go of marriage.” “Or maybe you’re just taking a roundabout way of getting there.” “Perhaps.” “Do you still dream about the moon made of ice?” I asked. Her head snapped up and she stared at me. Very calmly, slowly, a smile spread across her face. A completely natural, open smile. “You remember my dream?” she asked. “For some reason, I do.” “Even though it’s someone else’s dream?” “Dreams are the kind of things you can borrow and lend out,” I said. “That’s a wonderful idea,” she said. Someone called her name from behind me. It was time for her to get back to work. “I don’t have that dream anymore,” she said in parting. “But I still remember every detail. What I saw, the way I felt. I can’t forget it. I probably never will.” When I’m driving and the Beatles song “Yesterday” comes on the radio, I can’t help but hear those crazy lyrics Kitaru crooned in the bath. And I regret not writing them down. The lyrics were so weird that I remembered them for a while, but gradually my memory started to fade until finally I had nearly forgotten them. All I recall now are fragments, and I’m not even sure if these are actually what Kitaru sang. As time passes, memory, inevitably, reconstitutes itself. When I was twenty or so, I tried several times to keep a diary, but I just couldn’t do it. So many things were happening around me back then that I could barely keep up with them, let alone stand still and write them all down in a notebook. And most of these things weren’t the kind that made me think, Oh, I’ve got to write this down. It was all I could do to open my eyes in the strong headwind, catch my breath, and forge ahead. But, oddly enough, I remember Kitaru so well. We were friends for just a few months, yet every time I hear “Yesterday” scenes and conversations with him well up in my mind. The two of us talking while he soaked in the bath at his home in Denenchofu. Talking about the Hanshin Tigers’ batting order, how troublesome certain aspects of sex could be, how mind-numbingly boring it was to study for the entrance exams, how emotionally rich Kansai dialect was. And I remember the strange date with Erika Kuritani. And what Erika—over the candlelit table at the Italian restaurant—confessed. It feels as though these things happened just yesterday. Music has that power to revive memories, sometimes so intensely that they hurt. But when I look back at myself at age twenty what I remember most is being alone and lonely. I had no girlfriend to warm my body or my soul, no friends I could open up to. No clue what I should do every day, no vision for the future. For the most part, I remained hidden away, deep within myself. Sometimes I’d go a week without talking to anybody. That kind of life continued for a year. A long, long year. Whether this period was a cold winter that left valuable growth rings inside me, I can’t really say. At the time I felt as if every night I, too, were gazing out a porthole at a moon made of ice. A transparent, eight-inch-thick, frozen moon. But I watched that moon alone, unable to share its cold beauty with anyone. Yesterday Is two days before tomorrow, The day after two days ago.

It ends with his right hand gripping her left, the curve of her knuckles the pulling yoke. The plane is on its final approach. Greater Cincinnati lies ahead. Outside, it’s dark, snowing lightly. Every window seems to have concluded its broadcast day, though in houses down below people idle in front of “The Man from U.N.C.L.E.” and “The Lucy Show.” Whatever might happen above is not their concern. The landing gear is set. In two miles, the runway. Flaps 50. Altimeters cross-checked on zero seven. Inside the cabin, he squeezes her hand harder. The flight manifest lists them as Theodore Harris Martin (9B) and Emma Callahan Brady (6A), both from Los Angeles, specifically Studio City. The date is November 20th and the year is 1967 and the time is 8:57 P.M. It’s a Monday. In three days, it will be Thanksgiving. That is what we know. We also know that seven weeks earlier the Los Angeles Dodgers played their final game of the season, at home against the New York Mets. It was a Sunday afternoon, October 1st. The weather was warm, the sky cloudless—a perfect day for baseball, Vin Scully proclaimed to his radio audience. The stadium was half full, which even the most optimistic fan, looking around, would consider almost empty. No surprise. It was a meaningless game. A year ago, these Dodgers had been in the World Series, but now, without Koufax, they were third from last, last being these lowly Mets. The players seemed embarrassed to be there, like men pretending to be boys pretending to be men. Only Don Drysdale appeared at ease. The Big D signed autographs during batting practice, his veteran smile holding forth on reminiscences of broken-down buses and second-rate hotels, hours spent packed in ice, all those hero-to-bum ratios. Ted Martin, thirty-five, stood near the third-base rail, sheepish among the children, his left arm reaching forward, in his hand a baseball. He and Don shared a Van Nuys pedigree, only a few grades separating them in high school, though Don would retire soon, while Ted would remain a lawyer with fugitive dreams. You can’t pin all your hopes on just one thing, that’s what Ted’s wife said. You need options. Like an actual career. Then again, Carol was a practical woman who distrusted too much encouragement, except when it came to her singing in church. “Here you go, kid.” Drysdale placed the baseball back into Ted’s hand, and Ted wondered if “kid” was tongue in cheek, a jab between middle-aged men, or merely a function of the bottom line, pupils focussed on the endgame of ink. Were we all kids here? Ted lingered for a moment in the chorus before returning to his seat, and as he climbed toward his row he found himself wavering between feeling very young and feeling very old. His plan was to lord the baseball over his daughters, evidence of what they had missed: contact with a bona-fide All-Star, a future Hall of Famer, Don Drysdale in the flesh. Yesterday, the girls had begged him to let them skip the game—Please, please, please, Dad—so they could work on some Sunflower Girl project, and Ted had given in and last minute had to corral other people, which reminded him of his limited supply of friends, all of them busy today, the seats starting to signify a greater failure, until Renshaw from the office said yeah, sure, and asked if he could bring his twelve-year-old son, Renshaw Jr., the two of them visible up ahead. “Hot-dog guy came,” Renshaw said. “Peanuts, too,” Renshaw Jr. added. This information was self-evident and rather explicit on their faces. Ted stood there, delaying the knee-to-knee proximity. Over the stadium P.A., “I’m a Believer” played as a message for the fans next year. Ted’s oldest daughter loved Davy Jones; he could hear her shriek in his head. “You get anyone?” Renshaw asked. Ted showed him the ball as if it had been baptized and now possessed a soul. “Who’s that?” “Drysdale.” Renshaw nudged Renshaw Jr. This father-and-son combo reminded Ted of those before-and-after panels glimpsed in magazines, in this case advertising the effects of adolescence, of alcohol and age, of a hundred-pound weakling swelling into a thick vindictive bully, which gave Ted brief guilt since he had been the golden boy in high school, with enviable skin and a natural physique, a poor representative of the awkward teen-age years. And all for what, he wondered. To grow up and play the role of lawyer—like Robert Redford, another Van Nuys graduate, except his character in “Barefoot in the Park” married a free spirit and lived in New York City, in Greenwich Village, no less, and there was no church and there were no daughters and no Fluffy the goddam cat. There was only sex—sex and the most innocent and lovely of misunderstandings. “You should go,” Renshaw said to Renshaw Jr. “Huh?” “Go and get Drysdale’s autograph.” Renshaw Jr. stopped chewing his peanuts. “Got no pen,” he said. “Drysdale will have a pen.” “And got”—he swallowed—“nothing for him to sign.” “Use your program, nitwit.” Disarmed of excuses, Renshaw Jr. began clearing his lap of half-eaten food, no easy chore, and in the process knocked from his knee a box of popcorn that tumbled to the ground and shattered into its affiliated parts. The boy froze, perhaps hoping that this pose might suspend the ramifications of the spill. “Jesus Christ,” Renshaw said. You would have thought a prized vase had been broken. Renshaw turned to Ted. “Count yourself lucky you only have girls.” “Well—” Ted started. “No, believe me. Brainless doesn’t begin to do him justice.” The boy glanced up from the mess, his hands still maintaining the spiritual weight of what was lost. Ted had no desire to witness any further humiliations en route to Drysdale, so he hitched deliverance to a smile, in the mode of athletes and actors who squint at the light that glows from within—in this case, of Ted Martin, benevolent adult. “Here you go, kid,” and with that he tossed the baseball, well advertised in advance, something his middle daughter could have caught and she was easily the least coördinated of his girls, but maybe the sun was in Renshaw Jr.’s eyes, or he was distracted by the fallen popcorn; either way, the ball slipped through his hands, hit the concrete, and rolled into the gutter under the seats in front of them. Renshaw Jr. panicked, practically upending himself in the retrieval. “Hopeless,” Renshaw said. Around noon that day, people raised their hands in nearby Elysian Park and sought the return of the Great Spirit. It was the second love-in of the year, an unofficial follow-up to the first, which had been held on Easter and was still talked about in certain tuned-in circles. At least four thousand people had attended. A beautiful gathering of the tribes. And the Diggers had really outdone themselves with the food, in particular those psychedelic watermelons. The Flamin’ Groovies had played, as had the Peanut Butter Conspiracy and the Rainy Daze and a few other bands only half-remembered. Oh, and Barry McGuire had made an appearance, dressed as Adam, and someone later spotted him destroying some Eve under a Navajo blanket. It had been a magical day, though the Los Angeles Times had dubbed it “a camp-out of the camp, a rejoicing of the rejected.” This time around, there was no reporter on the scene, and there was no formal stage, no Chet Helms giving his blessing on behalf of the humans of the Haight; this Sunday roughly a thousand people came together in the hope of re-creating the past, and, as with many copies, the sharpness was blurred around the edges, its unique and special vibe desaturated, giving the proceedings an aura of forced joyfulness. Every smile insisted on another smile in return. Not that Emma Brady, thirty-three, noticed. She stood on the periphery and smiled, because this was all new to her, this roller-coaster ride of people. “Hello,” she said, whenever someone dipped into her line of sight, unsure if she really belonged here. Was she the sacrificial square? The parental mirror? Emma was only fifteen, ten, maybe as little as five years older than most of the assembled crowd, yet they all seemed so young compared with her state of affairs: more than a decade married, the mother of three boys, the youngest, six years old, by her side. “What are they doing, Mommy?” he asked. “Praying, I think.” “To God?” “Well, to a god.” Bobby thought about this and then said, “Like Sandy Koufax?” “No, more like Pete Rose,” Emma teased, since she was a Cincinnati Reds fan while the men under her roof bled Dodger blue. This weekend, the older boys and her husband were camping at Lake Casitas, and there had been pressure for her to go, to have the whole family together. C’mon, Em, we’ll fish and canoe and have a grand old time, or so her husband had said. Please. Join us. No, honey, not today. Not this weekend. Sorry. She was exhausted and in no mood to act as pioneer woman in gingham and kerchief. Two nights, that’s all, honey. Just like Mike to keep pushing, to treat her like the sullen daughter who was being difficult for the sake of being difficult. His enthusiasm always had the quality of a concealed weapon. And of course little Bobby had insisted on staying with her, his brown eyes like rising water and she his only means of escape, and this had really rucked Mike, though he would save the outburst for easier game, like the boys. Or the dog. Poor Tiger bore much residual blame. “Who are they?” Bobby asked. “Hippies, or most of them,” Emma said, though she could see other curious tourists like herself who had waded into this patchwork of suède and macramé, beads and exposed skin. The drums grew louder, and a more unified “om” vibrated the air. There was a main circle of people, a handful of committed participants at its center, many of them dancing with some kind of prop, while others gestured in ways that seemed to reference a greater mystical force. An array of musical instruments joined the fray, not necessarily in order or in tune: a guitar, a tambourine, a flute and a violin, their harmony squirming through the narrowest of openings. “This is weird,” Bobby said. Outside the main circle, smaller circles turned like human-size gears. “Yeah,” Emma agreed, and she wondered if this was like Easter—“On Easter, of all days,” Mike had complained when he saw the coverage on the local news. “Who are these people, to do this on Easter? I’m trying very hard to understand.” He certainly hadn’t looked to Emma for an explanation. A large man in a tuxedo and a top hat wandered by holding a dozen yellow balloons, each stencilled with the word “LOVE,” the sentiment seeming in opposition to his face, which was painted a ghoulish white. He spotted Bobby and stopped. “You wanna balloon?” Emma wondered if he was a struggling actor, an unemployed mime. Were all these people out-of-work artists? “Sure,” Bobby said. The man handed him one. “What are you going to give me in return?” “Um.” Emma reached for her pocketbook. “No money,” the man said. “Something else. An exchange of goods.” “I don’t think I have anything that you would want,” Emma tried to explain. “Sorry,” the man said, “I’m talking to the boy.” Bobby patted his pockets, produced a rabbit’s foot. “I’ve got this.” The man raised the fur toward the sun. “Is it lucky?” he asked. “Never done me any good.” Before this remark could fully sink in, of her son and his feelings of doom, of being jinxed, of always losing stuff and getting injured, of being too short, too dumb, totally talentless compared to his popular older brothers, and his father no help, either—Stop moping around—before Emma could glimpse her own self-doubt in those words, the man in the tuxedo and top hat had handed Bobby two more balloons. “Here’s your change,” he said. Frisella was pitching for the Mets, Foster for the Dodgers, and after six innings New York was winning, 1–0, with Moock scoring in the second on Bosch’s base hit to left. L.A. had managed only five scattered singles and was looking listless in the field—the diamond might as well have been a classroom clock on the last day of school. Ted maintained an orderly box score, something his father had taught him to do when they went to see the old Hollywood Stars at Gilmore Field, back when the Pacific Coast League was the only game in town. He enjoyed transcribing the action into the shorthand of LOBs and IBBs, the forward or backward K, the almost algebraic equations of SAC 8 and F 9 and DP 1-6-3. Here, human position was expressed in pencil, fate as a form of filling in the blanks. FC 4-6. “What are you doing?” Renshaw Jr. asked. The boy had recovered the ball, his sweaty palms rendering Drysdale’s signature a blur. “Keeping score,” Ted said. “That’s more than just the score.” “This is what’s behind the score,” Ted explained. “Like with the last inning, here’s Davis and his fly ball to right, and Ferrara’s single to center, and Roseboro, remember he had a pop fly to third, and then Fairly grounded to first—it’s all right here.” “Seems like homework,” Renshaw Jr. said. “I hear he turned water into wine, but it was a rather poor-quality Mesopotamian Cabernet.”Buy the print » “Not really. It just keeps you involved,” Ted said. “I like knowing what happened when Swoboda was last up—he grounded out, but before that he had a single, and maybe Foster will pitch him differently this inning, maybe not, but I have that information right here, the whole story. It’s like I’m a necessary witness.” Renshaw snorted before finishing his fourth beer. “What?” Ted asked. “Can’t we just watch the lousy game?” “Your boy was curious.” “No, he was just asking a stupid question.” “Well, I was giving him an answer.” “That wasn’t an answer, that was—I don’t know what the hell that was.” Ted heard a hint of his wife in the tone, an impatience that bordered on outright scorn, as though his brand of parenting interfered with the actual business of raising children, Carol constantly hovering nearby, an impresario reminding him to wrap things up, like at bedtime—especially at bedtime, and his habit of tucking in the girls and reciting from memory “The Children’s Hour,” by Longfellow: From my study I see in the lamplight, Descending the broad hall stair, Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra, And Edith with golden hair. Ted would insert his daughters’ names and sort of perform the poem, and maybe it was a bit long, and corny, too, but it was something he enjoyed doing, and something he thought the girls enjoyed hearing, and it was certainly better than the Monkees, and maybe they would remember a few stanzas and recall those moments with Dad and how he gave them a love for old-fashioned poetry regardless of any mutterings that it was getting late and the girls needed their sleep and instead of Longfellow how about a nice haiku? Carol always paused after one of her clever lines, anticipating laughter from an audience, it seemed. Was he pedantic and sentimental? Was there a worse combination? Swoboda grounded to short. How would he score his own existence? “Hey, necessary witness, you get that?” Renshaw cracked. Ted gave him a middle-finger grin. “I’m going to the bathroom,” he said. “We shall try not to bear false witness in your absence.” Then Renshaw cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted toward home, “Moock, you stink!” In Elysian Park, a growing line of people held hands and weaved through the crowd as fast as they could, the leader the needle guiding the thread. Bobby was somewhere in the middle. It had been too tempting for him to let pass without joining, and he had handed his mother the three balloons and jumped onto the end, holding this position briefly until others grabbed on and the line grew longer, its stitching more intricate. Emma watched from a distance. Every now and then, Bobby swung into view and she smiled and waved, feeling glad to be here, the strangest of Sunday picnics. A group nearby smoked marijuana from a peace pipe, just as she imagined they would, and she wondered about LSD, having seen that recent “Dragnet” episode with the sugar cubes and the acid freaks, the crazed blue boy. Detective Sergeant Joe Friday gave her husband yet another reason for his strict parenting. “These stories are true, Emma. These are simply the facts.” Mike could relate to Joe. After all, every father carries a kind of badge. And Emma just nodded along. But the people in Elysian Park seemed to be having a wonderful time, no bum trips in evidence, just a warm-flowing affection. She spotted Bobby again. They would have to keep this afternoon a secret. Once more she smiled and waved, and a palpable lightness came over her, possibly thanks to the balloons and the roving psychedelia, and even if this lightness could somehow lift her up from the ground and float her above the trees, no one around here would have noticed, or, in noticing, would have thought anything peculiar. Ted had no desire to return to the Renshaws; instead, he wandered around the concourse, thinking he should buy something for the girls, a pennant, maybe, but his mind was unable to commit to any purchase, and he soon found himself corkscrewing down the pedestrian ramp. The sensation of clandestine escape thrilled him, as though he had been called to action by a higher power, his wristwatch synched for some secret plan. Leave. Ted often thought about his destiny, about why he was here and for what purpose—to take out the trash, Carol would have cracked—and though there was a touch of narcissism in these meditations, a certain kind of hubris, in the end destiny seemed more like a gun pressed into his back leading him to who knows where. Just walk. And no funny business. Sometimes he figured the only question was where he would drop. Right now the snub-nosed barrel pushed him clear of Dodger Stadium and the Renshaws, and once outside prodded him away from his station wagon and toward Elysian Park. A single word hung in his head—“avocados.” He would bring avocados to the girls. Ted walked through the parking lot quilted with cars, and then fewer cars, until finally the empty gray plain ended on an accumulation of hills and trees and grass. The tint was more sepia than green, as if nature were an old photograph in the city’s scrapbook. An image of Ted’s father arose: the times he had taken him into the park to watch the filming of another Ken Maynard Western, with the horseplay and the shooting—his dad had been an accountant for Republic Pictures—and afterward they hunted for avocados, Ted in charge of climbing ever higher, his father directing from below. “Where else can you get free fruit in this town?” he would say. Twenty-five years later, Ted was back on the hunt. His shoes were all wrong for the task, the soles nothing but slip, and he grew winded from hiking the switchbacks to the top. He tried to remember where the avocado trees were, and when he finally found them, he struggled up the trunks in search of hidden fruit, it being late in the season. His wife hated avocados, something about the mushy texture reminding her of rotten flesh, as if she were on intimate terms with decay, and no doubt the girls would follow suit, but maybe he could show them the pleasures of the pit, how you could cut around the middle and twist and the halves would come apart around a hard center, a world hidden within a world—Carol would roll her eyes here—and how you could remove the pit and poke in a few toothpicks and rest this Sputnik half submerged in a glass of water, and in a few weeks you’d have the beginnings of a tree right there on the windowsill and some day avocados in the Martin back yard. This scenario played in Ted’s imagination as he searched the picked-over trees, dirtying his slacks and splitting a seam on his shirt, but on the fifth tree he spotted a runt, hanging high, its existence, once noted, hijacking the scene, like a dangling grenade. It took some atavistic climbing for Ted to reach that gnarled and hardly worth the effort avocado. But he had it. In his hand. It was ridiculous, but it was his. He paused for a moment, wedged between the branches, and from this peaceful vantage he could hear beating beyond the beating of his own heart, a beating of drums, like that of Indians of old, as if “The Fiddlin’ Buckaroo” were being shot in a nearby field. It was coming from over that hill, beyond that line of trees. Boom. Boom. Boom. Then Ted saw three balloons rising like a smoke signal, yellow balloons, neck and neck in the midday sky, and he thought of his daughters, though this thought was mostly buried and what emerged was an unexpected feeling of sadness, watching those three balloons disappear, as if the earth had been let go from someone’s hand. “Where are the balloons?” Bobby asked when he returned. Emma had a sense that he would want to bring them home and show his brothers and possibly brag about how he and Mom had had a swell time without them, went to Elysian Park, where there was a whole mess of people, some barely in clothes, like happies—happies? you mean hippies—yeah, yeah, hippies, and they had chanted and played games and he had traded his rabbit’s foot for these balloons, and his father, probably still in that flannel shirt and cartoonish fishing hat, would buttress his hands against his waist and give Emma the look that seemed his birthright, a look she feared seeing in her own boys, though in fairness Mike could also be loving, and fun, and certainly had a creative side, but so often that looseness snapped back into sanctimony, and the person she had loved without children, with children, she loved less. He had become nothing but father. The balloons would require an explanation and would garner that look, and Emma was unsure how many more of those looks she could survive. “They just blew away,” she told Bobby. “Oh.” “A big breeze suddenly came and—” Emma opened her fingers as illustration. “Oh.” “I’m sorry.” “It’s O.K.,” Bobby said, taking her hand. And this was what she always forgot: how Bobby made her failures his own. Instead of Ken Maynard riding his white stallion, Tarzan, the field below offered up an odder scene, as if the police had gathered all the kids who loitered in West Hollywood and Venice Beach, the stragglers glimpsed from passing cars, who were sometimes in the news, as in the recent rumors of a Haight-Ashbury outbreak in Beverly Hills, and deposited them here, in these few acres, all the freaks of L.A. It resembled a seasonal convocation, like one of those paintings by Bruegel which Ted loved, and as he walked downhill he could feel himself becoming an unexpected yet essential detail: man holding avocado, in torn shirt and grubby slacks. His presence was as appropriate as the people breathing fire or juggling or running in a circle half-naked: regardless of realms of being, all and sundry were turned toward a rapturous, if uncertain, center. “Hello, friend,” someone said. “Hello,” Ted answered, and then “Hello” again, and again, until he started offering up his own greeting without cue, like this was the first day of school, and every one of his hellos was met with equal enthusiasm, a great big sloppy welcome. He could hear Carol muttering something about the smell and what these people were smoking and could you somehow be affected as well because she had heard stories and in this day and age you had to hold tight to reason and if need be rely on tranquillizers for a decent night’s sleep, and Ted, please stop saying hello—much of the pleasure of being here was walking with the spectre of his wife, defining himself in opposition to her attitude. “Hello.” Sh-h-h. Halfway around the circle, Ted noticed something, someone, a flash of the familiar among the unfamiliar. The woman had no name, only a shape that slotted within Clinton Elementary, the child on her arm the youngest of three boys, a mirror to his own three girls, who fit between them like rungs on a ladder. He had seen her at the school before, and, though they had never exchanged words, he remembered a particular slyness that seemed to set her apart from the other mothers, a tilt of the head that sized up the world, a divot of suspicion across her brow. Ted stared at her in the hope of becoming visible, as if she alone had the ability to see him, and when that failed he went over and said hello. “Hi,” she said back. “No, I know you,” he said. “Or, I mean, I know you without knowing you, I mean, sorry, let me begin again: I think we have children at the same school.” The polite veil lifted and her eyes sharpened, the sudden focus almost pulling Ted forward. “Oh, that’s right,” she said, smiling with tactile consequences. Her front teeth were somewhat bucked, which only added to her over-all abundance. “You have girls,” she said. “And you have boys.” “Almost the same age.” “Almost the same age.” They practically sang this like a lyric. “And here’s my youngest,” she said. “Bobby, say hi.” “Hi, Mister.” “Martin,” Ted said. “Ted Martin.” “Emma Brady.” The thought of shaking hands passed between them, their indecision almost blush-worthy, until too much time had elapsed and the introductions fell to their feet. “Quite a circus?” Ted said. “Bobby and I were just—” Emma was explaining when Bobby interrupted. “There are, like, four guys on stilts,” he said, “and a monkey, too.” “Yeah, I was at the Dodger game—” “Really?” from Bobby. “Uh-huh.” “They win?” “Still going on but losing when I—” “They stink.” “They sure do,” Ted said, wishing he had a son who might settle him, might confirm his role as a father instead of as punch line for the girls and you’ll-never-understand and let-me-handle-this from Carol, his non-member status essential for their exclusive club—the clueless dad, the hopeless husband. The women in his life assumed his eternal collaboration, never as the star but as the supporting player, none of them realizing how quickly this could change, how suddenly he could step forward, if pushed even slightly. “Who was pitching for the Dodgers?” Bobby asked. “Alan Foster.” “Who?” “Exactly.” They both laughed, man to boy. “Sexy deep-sea diver’s not a thing.”Buy the print » Ted Martin, Emma repeated to herself, because she was bad with names and had been told repetition helped; Ted Martin, who had a wife who was blond and pretty but with a ridiculous hairdo, more like a silken shower cap, and who wore these elaborately knotted scarves; Ted Martin, her husband, the man who sat by her side during those school plays and recitals, those all-parent functions, his leg often tapping and his wife stilling him with a touch and a grin that was more public apology; Ted Martin, his attention shifting from the stage and toward the rafters, as if spotting something up there; Ted Martin, Emma christened in retrospect, the golden husband with the golden wife and the golden daughters, the golden couple of Clinton Elementary, of Studio City, and how he had once caught her looking up as well, hoping to see whatever circled overhead; Ted Martin, here in Elysian Park, laughing with her son, striking a pitcher’s pose, a small green ball in his hand. “They sorely miss Koufax,” he said. “What’s that?” Bobby asked, pointing toward his hand. “An avocado, and not a particularly good one, but it’s late in the season and all the trees around here have been pretty well scavenged. Did you know there were avocado trees here? A lot of them. All kinds of fruit trees. It used to be something I did with my dad.” Ted Martin flipped the avocado to himself. “Hey, if I threw this, you think you could catch it, Willie Mays?” Bobby nodded. “You sure?” “Yep.” “ ’Cause I’m going to toss it high, like above-the-trees high.” Bobby backed up, giddy at this adult challenge. “And you better catch it. I don’t want a bruise on this piece of free fruit.” “But not too high,” Bobby said. “O.K., not too high,” Ted agreed. “You sure you’re ready?” Bobby nodded again. “On the count of three, then. One.” In preparation, Ted Martin cranked his arm back, his torso angled toward the sky, and Emma smiled at the obvious exaggeration—“You sure you’re ready now?”—the full metre of his name having sunk in—“Two. Better not drop it, kid”—so that every breath seemed to scan him, seemed to rise and fall over the architecture of a Ted Martin home—“You sure you’re ready?”—Emma noticing the split seam on his shirt, along the left shoulder, the skin beneath a streak of sun—“Three.” After that day in the park, Ted Martin and Emma Brady each resumed their regularly scheduled existence as father and mother, husband and wife, though there were moments that still interrupted, all very innocent, like that easy toss and the game of catch, the dog that stole the avocado and the ensuing chase, a total of thirty minutes spent together before the clock turned toward the deeper meaning of an hour and they both came to the same conclusion, that they should go, it was getting late, so goodbye and maybe see you around school. Once back at home and reëstablished in their routine, they found their moods tightening, their ears sick of the everyday complaints, their mouths barely able to answer the everyday questions, neither fully understanding the repercussions of this chance meeting, those glimpses from Elysian Park which seemed to confirm their fate: they were trapped. It was one of those small things that could breed a tremendous amount of discontent, but soon the groove sank into the larger rut of days, and weeks, and months, the memory losing its attraction, its melodramatic possibility, and shifting instead to the silly fantasy of a school-yard crush on a fellow-parent, my goodness, as absurd as those hippies on stilts. By the time the Cardinals beat the Red Sox in the World Series, Ted Martin and Emma Brady had mostly forgotten one another and what endured was resignation: this is my life and it is a perfectly fine life. Thanksgiving was on November 23rd that year. Emma Brady was going to Cincinnati the Monday before, so that she could help her overwhelmed parents get ready for the onslaught of family. The new live-in housekeeper would handle the boys and cook their meals until the three of them flew east, on the twenty-second, with their father. When Mike heard this plan, he gave Emma his patented look, blue eyes narrowing as though her faulty logic were blinding, as though his gift to the world were reason, practically in his hands, right here, Emma, reason, take it, but Emma no longer cared about these looks, having negotiated her own terms from the above resignation, like hiring a live-in housekeeper, and going to Cincinnati, early and alone. “I really wish we were going together,” Mike said, as he pulled up to the curb for departures. “Makes so much more sense. Your parents have done Thanksgiving before. They can cook a turkey.” “I’ll call when I get to their house,” Emma said. “And you’re missing Pete being a Pilgrim, a minor Pilgrim but a Pilgrim. He’s disappointed. We all are.” Mike seemed to tick these points from the roof of his mouth, as if he maintained a list up there, his tongue the enumerating finger. “It’s not too late,” he said. Emma was barely listening; instead, she was imagining Ted Martin in the audience at the school play, sitting with his wife, his daughters probably Indian princesses, their hair the promise of native maize; Ted Martin, reformed in her mind; Ted Martin, sharper than before. “I should check in,” Emma said, opening the car door. “I can help with your bag.” “You should go.” A gesture brought a skycap. “I’ll call.” “I don’t like this,” Mike said. “I don’t like being separated like this. I really think you should stay.” His habit of always trying to win an argument, even when there was no argument to win, softened, and his eyes reverted to a warmer memory, of South Sea waters and a honeymoon that got Emma pregnant before she truly understood the meaning of sex. “I’ll see you soon.” Emma leaned back into the car and kissed him on the cheek. T.W.A. Flight 128, en route to Boston, Massachusetts, with stops in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, was departing at 5:37 P.M. from Gate 39. Ted Martin was behind schedule, a combination of bad traffic and his propensity for misgauging time, his internal clock always optimistic, as if he were the hero destined to arrive before the countdown reached zero. His wife hated this quality. Carol insisted on being early, waiting and checking her watch, her punctuality a lit fuse. But Carol was home, getting dinner ready for 6 P.M. sharp, while Ted was heading to Boston for a meeting on Tuesday. It was a job that no one else had wanted, since it was so close to Thanksgiving, but Ted enjoyed travelling, in particular flying; as a boy he would go to the Burbank airport with his dad and watch the Douglas DC-3s take to the air. “Still amazes me,” his father would say. “Every time they lift up seems a small miracle.” So Ted had volunteered for the mission and was now rushing through the terminal with only five minutes to spare, the flight already boarding on the tarmac. He weaved between people and warned them by way of preëmptive apology, his smile natural and broad, like the Juice chalking up another touchdown for U.S.C. When he got to Gate 39, he flashed his ticket at the attendant and she practically cheered him on through—Go, Ted Martin, go—and he maintained his speed right up the stairs, stepping into the cabin and half-expecting the passengers to greet him with applause. The plane was a Convair 880 and had seventy-five passengers with another seven in crew. Of course, nobody on board was aware of the particular story, of the sudden change in personal dynamics when Ted Martin and Emma Brady locked eyes, of the absolute recalibration of the world within that confined space. They both startled without moving, Ted in the aisle, Emma in her seat. What had been forgotten now came speeding back: Elysian Park on that beautiful fall day, the drums, the dancing. Ted was the first to smile. “Hi,” he said. “Hi,” she said back. “Going to Boston?” “Cincinnati.” Before anything else could be said, the stewardess prompted Ted to his seat. Three rows separated them, and as the cabin crew went through the safety procedures Ted and Emma seemed to experience every version of possible danger: the turbulence, the sudden loss of oxygen, even the remote possibility of a water landing. Ted could glimpse the back of Emma’s head, a shag cut, different from the bouffant of seven weeks ago, while Emma could feel the force of Ted’s green-gray eyes peering from behind—like sea glass, she recalled from that day in the park, a surprising piece of treasure. Tray tables were raised, smoking materials extinguished, and they both thought, We are alone. The airplane rose over Los Angeles and then headed east, the lowering sun like its counterweight, a reminder of what was being left behind, and in its place the lift and flow of what lay ahead. After the plane reached a cruising altitude of twenty-five thousand feet, the “Fasten Seat Belt” and “No Smoking” signs dimmed, and Ted rose without internal debate. He solicited all the powers of his charm and asked the older woman sitting next to Emma if she might possibly change seats with him so that he could talk with his friend and—God bless her—she agreed, with an almost expectant smile, as if she had been reverently waiting for this request. “Thank you so much,” Ted said, settling her into 9B. “Enjoy the flight,” she told him. And here they were, after seven weeks, seven weeks of leaving behind that day in Elysian Park, not even a day but thirty minutes, almost two days passing for every minute they had spent together, a minuscule percentage, and even less when measured against the length of a marriage. “Good to see you again,” Ted said. “You, too,” Emma said. “I like your hair.” “Really? No one else does.” “Well, I do.” “Thanks,” she said. “I needed a change, you know, even if it’s silly.” And this was the beginning. Over Nevada they flew, over Utah and Colorado, Kansas, Missouri, Illinois and Indiana, the distance gained bringing them closer together, as they both had screwdrivers, and white wine with their chicken fricassee, then more drinks, the two of them talking about their lives without ever mentioning spouses or children, their lives before they became what they became, as if up here they could begin again, begin again as the same people in different lives—in Paris, in New York, in London—and they smiled and seemed to recognize themselves in the other’s reflection, this attraction between strangers slowly growing into a passion between co-conspirators who could blow up the world in order to start another. What seemed impossible alone, together seemed possible. “Maybe I should stay in Cincinnati,” Ted said. “I’ll be with my parents,” Emma said. “Well, I’m due in Boston.” “So . . .” “We could both get delayed, make our phone calls, head to the nearest hotel.” Ted had never been so bold, Emma so accommodating. “A hotel,” she said, head tilting. “Yes.” “The two of us,” she said, “in a hotel.” “We can be Mr. and Mrs. Smith.” Ted leaned in closer. “Since I met you, you’ve been a pulse in my head. It’s like we are meant to be, like we’re connected, you know, like the universe is insisting on us being together. Maybe that sounds silly, as silly as your haircut.” “And our families?” Emma asked. That was the first mention of them. “The truth is, I see only two people here,” Ted said. These words, they seemed scripted. And here we are again, back to the beginning, which is the end. All the passengers have buckled their seat belts. The plane is on its final approach to Runway 18 of the Greater Cincinnati Airport. Light snow is visible through the windows. As the landing gear lowers, Ted Martin reaches for Emma Brady’s hand. This is their first touch of skin. We know from transcripts that the pilot and co-pilot reported no issues from the cockpit. Altimeters set and cross-checked on zero seven. Yaw damper, check. All is good. Ted squeezes Emma a bit harder, his thumb rubbing her thumb. They both hate landings. At 8:57 P.M., the airplane clips a few tree branches at an elevation of 875 feet m.s.l., approximately 9,357 feet short of the runway. After several more impacts with trees and, finally, the ground, T.W.A. Flight 128 comes to rest 6,878 feet from the runway. There it bursts into flames. The people in the few nearby houses hear nothing unusual, though minutes later they will hear the sirens and then imagine having heard a boom, taking possession of the disaster. As the airplane tumbled, Ted Martin and Emma Brady both flashed on their respective families, onto Marcia, Jan, and Cindy, onto Greg, Peter, and Bobby, onto Carol, onto Mike, a single all-encompassing thought that contained a world within a world where the two of them were forever missing. But that quickly passed. For now, in this world, they were alone, staring at each other, almost calm, their unforgotten hearts gripped by the fall. From the voice recorder, we know the captain’s final words: “Come on, you,” he said, trying to strain his arms into wings.

For a long time they do nothing but hide and wait. Very little light creeps in under the pantry’s double doors. Brooks examines the cans on the shelf level with his head: beans, corn, soup. This pantry does not belong to him—or to his sister Mary. They are in someone else’s home. Mary has her eye pressed to the door crack. “Do you have to breathe so loud?” she asks. “I’m trying to listen.” The pantry is small but not coffin-small, not so small that Brooks can’t stretch his arms wide like a—well, like a what, exactly? Like a scarecrow on a pole. O.K., a scarecrow, sure, but where did that image come from? From the muck of the way back when, no doubt. “Your long-term memory seems to be hunky-dory,” Dr. Groom has told Brooks more than once, jubilantly. Sure enough, a student theatre production from almost thirty years ago bubbles up fresh, unbattered: the out-of-tune piano at the end of the stage, the hard crusts of chewing gum under the seats in the auditorium, the flattened cereal boxes cut into rectangles and painted to look like a road of yellow bricks. Fourteen years old, Brooks nearly landed the coveted Scarecrow role in “The Wizard of Oz,” coveted because of the beautiful blond-haired fifteen-year-old playing Dorothy Gale, a girl who later, according to three Munchkins, gave it up to the Tin Man in the janitor’s closet. It might have been Brooks she gave it up to if he hadn’t screwed up in auditions and been cast instead as a member of the dreaded Lollipop Guild. “If I only had a brain,” Brooks sings. “That’s not funny,” Mary says and looks over at him. “I really wish you wouldn’t say things like that. It’s upsetting.” Say things like what? Oh, the bit about the brain. Brooks gets it now, why he’s thinking about the mindless scarecrow after all these years. Somewhere up in his head is the Old Brooks, that asshole, and he’s poking fun at this moodier, slower version of himself. “If you only had a brain,” Old Brooks is singing, a malicious smile on his chubbier face, his brown hair combed over neatly, not cropped short with scabby scars across the scalp. “You might feel irrationally angry sometimes,” Dr. Groom has said. If he’s feeling agitated, Brooks is supposed to ask himself why, to interrogate his agitation, but, God, does he want to punch something right now, anything, the angel-hair-pasta boxes or the cracked-pepper crackers, the clementines or the canned chickpeas, so many chickpeas, a lifetime’s supply of chickpeas. He could punch the peas into a mash and lick his knuckles clean. Brooks has lost all sense of how long they’ve been hiding in this pantry. He plops down onto a lumpy dog-food bag beside his sister. “I don’t hear them anymore,” Mary says. “They might be upstairs. Maybe they’re asleep.” Brooks nods, then lets his eyebrows scrunch. He can feel his sister studying him. “Have you forgotten why we’re in here?” Mary asks. “Have you forgotten about the dogs?” The events of the afternoon have been disassembled and constellated in his memory: a turkey sandwich, his sister’s Taurus, a small brass key from under a mat, a tiled kitchen floor, two snarling dogs. It’s like standing inches away from a stippled drawing and being asked to name the subject. And the artist. Mary gives him one of her pity smiles, where her upper lip mushrooms around her bottom lip, consumes it. She is a compact, muscular woman, still a girl really, with a body for the tennis court, not the sort of person you could knock over easily. The dog-food pebbles crunch under his sharp butt bones when he shifts. He’s lost weight, probably twenty pounds since the accident. Brooks doesn’t remember anything from that night, but according to the police (via his mother) he was alone at the time, unloading groceries from the back of his car on the street in front of his town house. Someone smashed the left side of his head with a brick. A brick! The police found it in some bushes down the street, along with bits of Brooks’s skull. The assailant took the car (which still hasn’t been recovered and probably never will be) and his wallet. “A random act of violence,” his mother called it. “A totally senseless thing.” Unnecessary qualifiers, he sometimes wants to tell her, as the universe is inherently a random and senseless place. “I need to go,” he says. “We can’t.” “Go, as in pee.” “Right,” Mary says. “Of course. I’m sorry. Let’s just give it a few more minutes. Just to be safe. The last thing we need is to go out there and get bitten.” He squirms. “Here,” she says and offers him a third-full bottle of organic olive oil. “You can pee in this.” You can pee in this. Mary feels like one of the nurses. Brooks is staying with her for a month, while their mother is away, and that means she is responsible for his meals, for his entertainment, for getting him to all his appointments. Yesterday they had to wait forty-five minutes for the doctor to return to the examining room. Brooks was a broken record while they waited: “Pencil box screen door pencil box screen door.” Dr. Groom was to blame for this. One of his memory games. The doctor often began his checkups by listing a random series of words for Brooks to repeat later, on command, a test of his short-term memory. Before leaving, their mother had warned that Brooks might attempt to scribble the words on his hand when the doctor wasn’t looking. Brooks, their mother had explained, wanted his independence back almost as much as they wanted to give it to him. But that wasn’t possible yet. He still had what she called “little blips.” He could be coherent and normal one minute and the next . . . well. “Pencil box screen door pencil box . . .” “You don’t have to remember it anymore,” she said. “The doctor already asked you, and you got it right. You already won that game.” That didn’t stop him. He hammered each syllable hard, except for the last one, door, to which he added at least three extra breathy “o”s. He ooooohed it the way a ghost or a shaman might. Maybe he is a shaman. Who can say. What the doctors call hallucinations and delusions—maybe they are something else entirely. Mary read an article somewhere online explaining that people with brain injuries sometimes report unusual and even psychic side effects. There was a stroke victim who said he could read a book and be there—actually be in the book, tasting the food, smelling the air. A teen-ager in a car accident lost his sense of taste but said he could feel other people’s emotions. It had something to do with unlocking previously unused parts of the brain. Watching her brother clumsily tap his fingers on the shiny metal table, Mary wondered if it was possible he was in communication with something larger than both of them: a cosmic force, the angels, Frank Sinatra, anything. She doubted it. Her poor brother could barely button his shirt. And as for those words, the skipping record, maybe he’d fallen into some sort of terrible neural-feedback loop. He seemed to be saying it involuntarily now. She was ashamed by how much she wanted to slap her brother. Her whole life, Brooks had been the one looking after her—and so what right did she have to be irritated now? When things got rough with her boyfriend after college, it was Brooks who drove all the way down to Atlanta and helped her pack her things. It was Brooks who defended her to their mother when she quit her job with the real-estate company. It was Brooks who wrote her a check to buy the Pop-Yop, her soft-serve franchise. She worried that it would never be that way between them again, that the balance had forever shifted, and then she felt selfish for worrying about such a thing. Brooks needed her. It was her turn. “Your pants, Brooks,” she said and handed him his khakis. He stood there beside the exam table in white underwear and a wrinkled blue shirt, holding the khakis out in front of him like an unwanted gift. Mary was supposed to have ironed his shirt for him before they left the house that morning, and that she hadn’t fulfilled this duty was obviously a source of some anxiety for her big brother. He could no longer tolerate creases—in clothes, in paper, in anything. Watching him step into his pant legs, she thought he might bring up that morning’s ironing debacle again, but he tucked in the shirt and zipped his pants without comment. His crease-intolerance was one of many changes that had come with the accident. A longtime smoker, he now said that smoke made him feel sick. He had a closet full of dark clothes that these days he deemed depressing. In fact, his new favorite article of clothing was a tight, bright-pink-and-purple sweater that Mary wouldn’t let him wear outside the house, because it wasn’t his but their mother’s. When, finally, Dr. Groom came back, Mary stayed seated in her little plastic chair, eying all the instruments, the cotton swabs and the tongue depressors in the glass jars, the inflatable cuff of the blood-pressure device. The bigger, more impressive machinery was somewhere else, in another building. The nurses had trouble keeping Brooks still in those machines. Apparently, he got antsy. “Pencil box screen door,” Brooks blurted, all trace of shaman gone from his voice. “Very good, Mr. Yard,” the doctor said and then leaned back against the table to explain the scans, how they were looking good, better than expected, given the nature of the accident and Brooks’s age, which was forty-four. Of course, he said, it wasn’t all about the scans. The scans wouldn’t show any shearing or stretching, for instance. But Brooks was doing well, that was the bottom line. He wasn’t slurring his words. His headaches were less frequent. Even his short-term memory was showing signs of improvement. A fuller recovery, the doctor said, might very well be possible. Brooks is not sure how possible it will be to pee, cleanly, into a third-full bottle of organic extra-virgin olive oil, especially given the tiny circumference of its plastic top. The tip of his penis will not fit into that hole. The bottle is a little slippery. He pops off the black top that controls the outward flow of the oil and hands that to Mary. He turns away from her and unzips. “I’ve got this can of Pirouette cookies ready if you run out of bottle,” Mary says. “I just need you to be quiet.” He concentrates—or doesn’t. What’s required is the absence of concentration. That should be easy, shouldn’t it? He’s a pro at that now. He sees a yellow brick road. The urine comes in splashy spurts at first and then streams steadily. The bottle warms. The urine pools in a layer above the olive oil, all of it yellow. Thankfully, he doesn’t need the cookie tin for overflow. Mary hands him the top when he asks for it and tells him job well done. Bottle plugged, they decide to store it under the lowest shelf, out of sight for now. He plops back down onto the dog-food bags. If he had to, he could sleep like this. He checks his wristwatch with the shiny alligator-leather strap, a gift from a long-ago girlfriend. Which girlfriend, he couldn’t say. “We’ve been in here for an hour,” Mary says. She stands and peers again through the crack in the double doors. “Maybe we should just go for it. I don’t see the dogs.” Her left eye still at the crack, she crouches down for a new angle on the outside world, her small hands on either side of the white door for balance. “Let me,” Brooks says, rising. He grabs the brass knob near her left temple, and Mary slides away to let him pass. He emerges from the pantry. To his right, through another doorway, he can see a kitchen with a high white ceiling and recessed lights. To his left, a long unfamiliar hallway unfolds, hardwood floors with wide dark-red planks, at the end of which an imposing grandfather clock ticks. “Not that way,” Mary says when he starts down the hall. “Which one of us is me?”Buy the print » He hears a distant clacking of nails, a jangling of collars. Never has such a tinkly sound seemed so ominous. Mary is behind him now, tugging at his shirt, his arms, pulling him back into the sepulchre of the pantry. The dogs are approaching, their stampede echoing down the hallway. When his back collides with the food shelves, two fat cans drop and roll at his feet. Mary pulls the doors shut again. Seconds later, the dogs galunk into them. Their bulky, invisible weight shakes the flimsy wood so hard Brooks wonders if the hinges might pop. Mary holds the brass knobs tight, as if worried that the dogs are capable of turning knobs. The dogs growl. It’s hard to think straight over that noise. “I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have let you go out there. That was dumb of me.” “What are they, exactly? What breed?” “Rottweilers? Dobermans? I don’t know what they are, but they’re freaking huge. Biggest dogs I’ve ever seen. Genetically modified, maybe. Wynn would do that. Order a bunch of genetically modified military dogs. That would be so him. There are two of them, Baba and Bebe. Wait, let me try something. I think I just remembered it.” The dogs are still clawing at the pantry doors. She sticks her lips to the crack and says, “Baba Beluga.” The dogs don’t stop their attack. “Bebe, Baba, Baba O’Riley. It’s something like that.” “What is?” “The safe command. Oh, Goosie, I’m sorry I got you into this.” Goosie. When was the last time she called him that? Back at his town house, in the drawer to the right of the stove (his mind still has that power at least, the power to conjure up images, to see things that aren’t directly in front of him), he must have a hundred thank-you cards addressed to Goosie. Thank-yous for the loan, the money that helped her buy the soft-serve place that she had, until then, only managed. The golden egg, she called his loan. Him, the goosie. “The safe command will make them docile,” she says. “Remind me again who Wynn is to you?” he asks. “A friend,” she says quickly. “He’s out of town for a few days, and I agreed to feed his dogs and bring in the mail. He gave me the safe command before he left. I should have written it down.” “Could have just told me. I would have remembered.” She smiles. “Let’s just call someone for help,” Brooks says. “I would if I could. My cell is out in the car.” Brooks fishes around in his pockets. “Yours is in the car, too,” she says. “Well, that’s bad luck. What should we do now?” “When they settle down again, we’ll go together. There’s a door in the kitchen. That’s, what, like, thirty feet from here?” Brooks isn’t sure but nods. The dogs are no longer scrabbling at the doors but whining. They walk in circles, with clicking nails, outside. Mary reaches over Brooks’s shoulder for a bag of pistachios. She rips open the plastic at the top and offers him some. “We missed breakfast,” she says. He doesn’t want any nuts. He sits down on the dog food again, his head back against a shelf. His medication can make him groggy. He needs to rest his eyes. He is halfway in a dream when Mary announces that it’s time for another attempt to escape. The dream is about fishhooks. Well, not about fishhooks, but it involves them. He is looking for one in the bottom of a tackle box. Brooks hasn’t gone fishing in more than a year, probably not since his last trip to Nicaragua. His company, which he started with a friend a decade ago, manufactures medical devices and has a factory outside Managua. The last time he was down there, Brooks took a few extra days and chartered a deep-sea-fishing boat out of San Juan del Sur. He caught a striped marlin, though it was the captain who did the hard work, setting up the rod, finding the right spot. All Brooks did was wait and take orders, reel when the captain yelled to reel. Going deep-sea fishing is, actually, kind of like how he lives now. Sure, he can fry a few eggs, but only if there is someone there to help him, to keep him on task, to clean up the mess when his hands fail him, to calm him down when he loses his temper, to reel him in. “You have gunk on your face,” Mary says and wipes it away with a wet thumb. “I think it’s old soy sauce.” “Are you sure we should go for it again?” he asks. “How long will the owners be away? We could survive in here for days.” “No,” she says. “I got us into this mess. I’ll get us out.” Brooks knows this is the truth, that his sister is to blame, but he can’t let go of the feeling that he should be masterminding the escape. After all, he’s the big brother. He’s always taken care of her. That’s just how it is. His former self, the Old Brooks, up there somewhere, would know exactly what to do in this situation. Old Brooks sees a solution, surely, but he’s keeping quiet about it. He’s enjoying all this confusion. “Try not to think about who you were before the accident,” Dr. Groom has said, “and concentrate instead on who you want to be now. Accept the new you.” Sometimes Brooks wants to toss Dr. Groom out the window. Mary opens the pantry doors. She doesn’t see the dogs. If only she had poison. She imagines Wynn coming home and finding both dogs dead. She imagines him cradling their bodies and weeping. No, Wynn wouldn’t weep. He’d probably just buy two more dogs, recycle the names, and move on with his life. Mary has never killed an animal as big as a dog. She veered her car in order to hit a squirrel once and regretted it for two days. She makes it a few steps into the kitchen before realizing that Brooks has fallen behind. He has stopped at the fridge. Photos and appointment cards are stuck to the front of it with magnets. He’s looking at a Polaroid, one she can see—of two children, a tiny girl and an older boy, on a seesaw. Across the bottom someone has written “What goes up . . . ” She waves at him to get his attention. At least forty feet of tiled floor separate them from the back door. She considers sprinting for it, but they haven’t discussed that as the plan, and she doesn’t want to surprise Brooks. She takes two steps, then two more. It’s when she reaches the entrance to the living room that she sees them in there, twenty feet away, the dogs, heads low, tails stiff, coarse black fur mohawked up along their backs. Is it possible that the dogs have set an elaborate trap for them? “What’s wrong?” he asks, far too loud. The dogs growl. Their heads drop even lower. “Baa baa black sheep,” Mary whispers. “Bibi Netanyahu.” Maybe Wynn has changed the password. She hates him now more than ever. Her friends warned her about him. They’d heard strange things about him. Perverted things. According to a guy who used to work with him, he cheated on his wife constantly. He’d been with a hundred women. Probably his dick was contaminated, they said. At least make him wear a condom, they said. Brooks can’t see the dogs, but he hears them now. His sister inches backward. He could probably make it to the pantry in time. But not Mary. He looks around the room for something that might help them. He sees the cordless phone on the wall behind him. Mary could call her friend for the safe command, and all this would be over. “Top of the fridge,” he whispers. “What?” She sneaks a look over her right shoulder. Brooks leans back for the phone as Mary lunges for the fridge. When he turns, she’s trying to use the ice dispenser as a foothold. The freezer door swings open. She slams it shut and scrambles up onto the soapstone counter. From there she pulls herself up onto the fridge. Brooks is not far behind her. Phone in hand, he flings himself onto the counter, belly first. He feels like a spider with all its legs ripped out. He’s having trouble getting up onto his knees. He reaches for a cabinet knob. One of the dogs locks onto his ankle, and he screams. He writhes, swinging the phone back and forth. When the phone connects with the dog’s head, he loses his grip on it and it goes clattering to the floor. But he’s free now. He’s able to clamber up beside his sister. The top of the fridge is covered in dust. They have to crouch to avoid hitting their heads on the ceiling. “You’re bleeding,” Mary says, bending down to his ankle. “Don’t bother with it now.” He looks down at the dogs, at their giant stinking faces. One dog is on the floor whimpering, and the other is pogoing up and down the front of the fridge, knocking loose all the photos and appointment cards. Its back paws come down on the phone and launch it sideways. “I dropped it,” Brooks says. “The phone. Sorry. We could have called your friend.” Mary is prodding at his ankle unscientifically. “Don’t worry about it. That wouldn’t have worked anyway.” “Why, he’s out of the country or something?” “Well—” “He doesn’t know we’re here,” Brooks says. His sister looks at him as if she were the one with the dog bite. The night Wynn first brought out his video camera they were in Myrtle Beach, at his family’s vacation home. Mary listened to the waves through the open window as Wynn fiddled with a tape. Wynn with his blue eyes, the perfect gray streak in his long, windswept hair, the difficult marriage to his crazy pediatrician wife, who was hardly ever around. Then he told her to start playing with herself. Already she could anticipate the regret. Maybe that was part of the fun. Did she enjoy making the video? A little bit, sure. For the newness of it. But not for the sex itself. It didn’t even feel much like sex to her. It was like something else. She was a planet, way out in space, out of its orbit, and he was an unmanned spaceship, taking measurements of the atmosphere. She was not suitable for habitation. The pillowcases smelled like potato chips and sweat. She wondered if he’d even washed the sheets, if maybe this was one of the kids’ bedrooms. He smacked her bottom, and she almost laughed. It wasn’t risqué, it was silly. She broke off the affair a few weeks later, when he proposed a new video, this one in his bathroom at home. His wife was at work and the kids were at school. He already had the camera out. “Do you ever watch these later?” she asked. “Not really,” he said. “It’s not about that. Making them is what’s fun. It is fun, isn’t it?” She was in a white towel, examining the shower. There was blond hair trapped in the drain. His wife’s, no doubt. One of the drawers under the sink was halfway open, and she could see cotton swabs and a box of tampons. She opened the medicine cabinet and found three different kinds of antidepressants. “Not mine,” he said. “Let’s start with you in the shower. You ready?” She slipped back into her underwear and told him it was over. “I don’t understand,” he said. “I want the tape,” she said. “From the beach.” “I erased it. I always tape over them.” She left him half naked in the bathroom. Later, she wondered if she might have got the tape from him then if she’d only been a little more persistent. She thought about it constantly. At work, ringing people up, she lost track of the numbers. She spilled a box of rainbow sprinkles, and what should have been a ten-minute cleanup took her almost thirty. “You’ve got to get that tape,” her friends said. “What if he puts it online?” Online! She started visiting pornography sites, just in case. There were so many categories of sex. She couldn’t believe all the categories: Mature, POV, MILF, Amateur, Ex-Girlfriend. How might Wynn have categorized her? She called him and demanded the tape. “I already told you,” he said. “It doesn’t exist anymore.” “I’ll call the cops.” “Listen, if I had it I’d give it to you, but I don’t. You can’t just call me like this. I’m at work.” She imagined a locked desk drawer in his home study, a hundred tapes, each with a label, her name on one of them, the date, the location, the positions, the noises made, all of it charted out and diagrammed. This was her situation to fix. Wynn kept a key hidden under a rock on the back porch. She remembered that. All she had to do was wait for the right day, the right moment. “And so you think he has the tape here,” Brooks says. “Somewhere in this house? And that’s why we broke in?” She nods. “You could have just told me,” he says. “You would have judged me.” “Sure, but only a little.” “Would you have gone along with it? If you’d known we were breaking into someone’s house?” “No, of course not,” he says. “I would have waited in the car.” She smiles at him, and he is relieved to see that it’s a real smile, without a trace of pity. “So where is Wynn now?” he asks. “How much time do we have?” Buy the print » “A few hours, maybe. They drove up to Chapel Hill for the day. His son’s looking at colleges.” She knows this because Wynn shares so much of his life online. When she was with him he was hardly ever without his phone. “If I had a sex tape, I don’t think I’d keep it in the house for my wife to find.” “You don’t know Wynn.” The dogs have stopped barking. They sit patiently at the foot of the fridge. Brooks’s ankle throbs. He doesn’t know what to do next. If only he could curl up here and take a nap. But the dogs will never give up. They are trained to attack intruders, and that’s exactly what he and Mary are. They’re the intruders. He has broken into someone’s home. He needs a brick. Where’s his brick. Give him a brick. Brooks jumps, not over the dogs and toward the door but to their left. He lands on both feet and sprints back down the hall. The dogs follow. He’s the distraction, the bait. “Find it!” he yells back to Mary. He passes the pantry. Ahead of him is the grandfather clock. A blue Oriental rug shifts sideways as he turns left at the end of the hall. He runs up a wide staircase, hand on the rail, and at the top he sees that there are doors, three of them. They all look the same. It’s like a terrible game show. He grabs the knob of the middle door, but his fingers won’t grip right. “Some things will get better and others won’t,” Dr. Groom says, and Brooks will have to accept that. But it’s not his fingers, he realizes. The door is locked. He slings his shoulder into it with all his weight. Thankfully the lock is cheap and the door pops open. Closing it behind him, he finds himself in a room with hot-pink walls decorated with gruesome movie posters. A stereo and a television barely fit on a small white desk beneath the window. In the dead, gray television screen, Brooks can see his warped reflection staring at him: his awful haircut, his skeletal face. Overhead, the ceiling fan spins. The bedspread moves. Moves? A tiny wiggle at the corner of his vision. An almost imperceptible change in the arrangement of wrinkles in the blanket. Like a scene from a horror movie. In the months after the accident, Brooks experienced what he now knows were mild hallucinations. At the hospital he became temporarily convinced that a family of goats had taken up residence under his bed. They had gray coats and black eyes, and at night they came out to lap water from the toilet. If Brooks called for help, the goats would scatter in all directions. Dr. Groom had explained that Brooks could no longer implicitly trust everything he saw and heard. What Brooks needed, he said, was a healthy dose of skepticism. If goats were ransacking his room, he was supposed to remember that it would be very tricky for a goat to get past the hospital’s front desk and take the elevator to the third floor. If the coatrack asked him for a grilled cheese, Brooks needed to remind himself that coatracks did not typically require human food, especially grilled cheese. If a bedspread sprang to life . . . He steps toward the bed. There are pillows piled at the head and foot. In the middle, under the bedspread, is a person-size lump. He watches it closely. “Who’s under there?” he asks. The lump is very still. “I’m trying to leave,” he says. “So don’t be afraid. All of this was a big mistake. Us being here, I mean. We know your dad. We got trapped. By your dogs.” The lump doesn’t move. “I’m Brooks. I’m not sure if you’re actually under there. Maybe I’m talking to nothing. I can get a little confused. I haven’t always been this way.” He steps toward the desk. “I’m moving your desk so I can go out the window. Your dogs want to eat me. So I’m going out the window. Sorry.” An apology to a ghost. He slides the desk toward the closet, everything on it rattling. A water glass topples over and the liquid rolls. He grabs a sock off the floor and sops it up before it reaches a closed laptop covered in pink monkey stickers. “I spilled some water,” he says, “and I had to use one of your socks. Sorry. Your laptop is fine, I think.” He gets the window open and pops out the screen, which lands below in some holly bushes. He sticks one leg out and straddles the sill. It’s a long way down, but not so far that he will necessarily break a bone. Still, this is probably going to hurt. “Ba baboon,” the lump says. “I’m sorry?” “Say that to the dogs and they won’t attack you.” “So you’re really under there?” The lump doesn’t answer. “Thank you. That’s very kind. I’m Brooks.” “Yeah, you said that already.” “Aren’t you supposed to be off with your family or something?” “I got out of it. Please go now.” “I hope you’re not just in my head,” he says and goes to the door. “Because that would mean ‘ba baboon’ is total nonsense, and I’m going to get bitten again.” The lump doesn’t answer. He’s about to turn the knob but stops. “By the way, just in case this ever happens again—” “God. Why haven’t you left yet?” “I will. I’m about to. But next time this happens you should really consider calling the police—or at least your parents.” The lump is quiet. “Just an idea,” Brooks adds. The lump sits up fast, the bedspread transformed into a mountain. “Look, my mom, like, stole my cell, all right?” the lump says. “And the only phone up here is all the way in my parents’ room, and it’s not like I had a ton of options, you know? I told you what to say, now go. Just get out of here.” Brooks isn’t sure what to say. He considers apologizing again. “Actually, I lied,” the lump says. “I did call the police. They’ll be here, like, any minute. You’re going to jail.” “O.K.,” Brooks says, hand on the door. “I’m going.” When Mary climbs down from the fridge, part of her just wants to leave and forget the tape. But she can’t do that. Brooks could be hurt upstairs. He could lose his way. He could trap himself in the linen closet and, in the dark, lose himself entirely. Until her brother’s accident, Mary never gave much thought to the idea that personalities may be not only malleable but also divisible from the self. There has to be more to us than memories and quirks that can get smashed away so easily. This raises questions of accountability. What part of her is accountable for her decisions if all that stands between Mary being Mary and not someone else is a simple bump on the head? Wandering down the hall in search of the tape, she finds a room with a computer on a mahogany desk and a leather chair on a clear plastic mat over the carpet. Wynn’s camera is on the chair, and in a metal tray beside the computer she finds a stack of small gray tapes. She can’t sort through them here. She’ll just have to take them all with her. She dumps out a bag of tangled cables, connectors and startup disks and drops the tapes into the bag. Then she adds the camera, just in case. The hallway is quiet. Brooks is upstairs somewhere—and the dogs? At the bottom of the stairwell, she hears their nails. “Get out, Brooks!” she yells, and runs back the way she came, down the hall, past the grandfather clock and the pantry, into the kitchen, all of it so familiar now. She goes out the back door and into the yard, the sunlight on her face, a stultifying whiteness. One day she will forget everything, and there will be nothing left of her except . . . This. Whatever This is. Total erasure, maybe. She roams around the perimeter of the house, searching for any sign of Brooks up in the windows. She sees a popped-out screen in some bushes, but there’s no sign of Brooks up above in the window. On the front porch, she leans into a narrow window beside the door with her hands cupped around her eyes. Through the thin white curtain she can barely make out a table in the foyer, a painting on the wall above that, and the base of the wide staircase. She rings the doorbell three times, hears it echo in the house. She is about to abandon the porch when through the window she sees feet, then knees, then a torso. Brooks is striding down the stairs as if he owned the place. The dogs follow him, no longer vicious at all, their heavy dumb tongues lolling over sharp, crooked teeth. Her brother has tamed the beasts. The dead bolt clicks open, and there he is, framed in the doorway, her big brother. The dog bite isn’t deep enough to warrant a trip to the emergency room. “No more stitches,” he says. “Please.” Back at Mary’s, he takes a hot shower and lets the water trickle over his wound. Blood swirls around the drain. He towels off and wraps his ankle with gauze and then falls into a long nap on top of the covers. When he wakes up, it’s dark out. He does his exercises at the foot of the bed, then heads downstairs. In the den, the blinds are drawn and the television screen casts a blue light across the furniture. On the floor, stacks of gray tapes surround a video camera tethered to the television by a long cord. Brooks sits down cross-legged and brings the camera into his lap. He can hear Mary in the kitchen, rattling pots, preparing dinner. The tapes all look the same. He picks one off the top and pops it into the camera. When he pushes play, he keeps his finger on the button, just in case he’s presented with something no brother wants to see. Two lines squiggle across the screen, and then a patio appears, a concrete space bright with sunlight. The camera is bouncy in someone’s hand. Two kids are on the ground, dyeing Easter eggs in red Dixie cups. The boy, maybe twelve years old, gives an egg to his younger sister. Holding it between two fingers, she dips it in the cup. “Hey, I didn’t know you were awake,” Mary says, striding into the den in an apron. When she sees what he’s watching, she sighs and sits down beside him on the floor. They stare up at the television together. It’s been years, Brooks thinks, since he last saw this tape, but it’s all coming back to him now: their dye-stained fingertips, Easter eggs buried in the pine straw, the smell of the azalea bushes, his mother lounging in the yard with her Bible and People magazines. “Seems like yesterday that was us,” Mary says. The little girl on the screen knocks over the cup and colored water spills all over her dress, the blue dye splashed up across her chest. She faces the camera bewildered, looking for help or reassurance, maybe, and begins to cry. “We shouldn’t be watching this,” Mary says and grabs the camera from Brooks’s lap. “It’s wrong. Do you think I should try to return this stuff? I feel awful about it. I guess I could leave it all on the doorstep.” As she’s saying this, a woman Brooks doesn’t recognize rushes onto the screen with a handful of paper towels for the little girl’s dress, and only then does he fully understand that this isn’t their patio or their Easter or their mother. This isn’t their childhood at all, and never was. “Stop clinging to the Old Brooks,” Dr. Groom likes to say, “and guess what? You’ll still be you.” He looks over at Mary, her finger poised on the stop button. But she doesn’t press stop. She doesn’t pull the cable from the camera or gather the tapes back into the crinkling bag, either. She is watching the boy, onscreen, as he holds up a perfect egg and then runs out of the frame. The little girl climbs onto her mother’s lap and cries into her shoulder. The scene cuts: the kids are off searching for the eggs—in tree limbs, desk drawers, mulch beds, and, improbably, under a doormat. “Not there,” Mary says aloud. “I mean, really.” When the video ends, the room is dark, and they are quiet. Brooks waits a few seconds before sliding another tape across the floor to her. Mary’s eyes dart up his arm to his face, her expression so serious that he wonders if she’s really allowing herself to see him for the first time since the accident. He mushrooms out his upper lip, imitating her pity smile, and she rolls her eyes. Then she loads the next tape.

“I’m Camilo!” he shouted to me from the gate, opening his arms wide, as if we knew each other. “Your daddy’s godson.” It seemed terribly suspicious to me, like a caricature of danger, and I was nine then, already too big to fall for a trap like that. Those dark glasses, like a blind man’s, on a cloudy day. And that jean jacket, covered in sewn-on patches with the names of rock bands. “My dad’s not here,” I told him, closing the door, and I didn’t even give my father the message; I forgot. But it turned out to be true: my father had been a close friend of Camilo’s father, Big Camilo—they’d played soccer together on the Renca team. We had photographs of the baptism, the baby crying and the adults looking solemnly into the camera. All was well for several years—my father was an engaged godfather, and he took an interest in the child—but then he and Big Camilo had a fight, and later, some months after the coup, Big Camilo was imprisoned, and after he was released he went into exile. The plan was for his wife, July, to bring Little Camilo and meet up with him in Paris, but she didn’t want to, and the marriage, in fact, ended. So Little Camilo grew up missing his father, waiting for him, saving up money to go and visit him. And one day, just after he turned eighteen, he decided that if he couldn’t see his father he should at least find his godfather. I learned all this over tea the first time Camilo came to have onces with us, or maybe I found it out gradually. I want to be clear here, and I’m getting confused. But I remember how moved my father was that afternoon when he saw how much his godson looked like his old friend. “You have the same face,” he told him, which was not necessarily a compliment, because it was an unremarkable face, difficult to remember, and though Camilo used many products to style his stiff hair fashionably, it had a tendency to play dirty tricks on him. Despite my initial distrust, Camilo soon became a benevolent and protective presence for me, luminous, a real older brother. When he set off for France to fulfill his lifelong dream, that’s what I thought: that it was my brother who was leaving. It was January of 1991; that I can say for certain. I wasn’t the only one who was fascinated by Camilo. My older sister was completely infatuated, and my younger sister, who could not usually keep her attention on anything for more than two seconds, would watch him intently when he came to visit, celebrating every one of his wisecracks. Not to mention my mom, with whom he joked around but also talked seriously, because during that time Camilo was—in his own words—full of religious tension, and although my mother was no saint, she was so astounded by the idea that a person could deny the existence of God that she’d sit and listen to him in awe. As for my father, I think that, for him, Camilo became more of a companion or a friend than a godson; he even let Camilo address him with the informal “you.” They would sit up late in the living room, talking about all kinds of things—except about the existence of God, because my father didn’t allow such things to be questioned, or about soccer, because Camilo was the first man I met who didn’t like soccer. He didn’t even understand the rules. The only match he’d ever played took place in the San Miguel gym, when he was five years old: his knowledge of the game back then came from the goals he’d seen replayed on TV, so he spent the whole afternoon running every which way, cheering for goals that hadn’t happened and happily waving to the crowd, utterly uninterested in the ball. My own relationship with my father, however, was closely tied to soccer. We watched or listened to games, sometimes we went to the stadium together, and every Sunday, at noon, I went with him to a field in La Farfana, where he played goalie. He was really good—I remember him suspended in the air, grabbing hold of the ball with both hands and clutching it to his chest. Still, I always suspected that his teammates must hate him, because he was the kind of goalie who spends the whole game barking instructions, ordering around the defense and even the midfield players, all at the top of his lungs. “Pass it back, man, pass it back! Here! Pass it back, man, back!” How many times did I hear my father call that out in a tone of utmost alarm. When he yelled at me—if he ever did—it was never as loud as those shrieks that his teammates bore in annoyance, or at least that’s what I assumed, since trying to play with that nonstop commotion in the background can’t have been pleasant. But he was respected, my father. And he was really good, I’ll say it again. I would settle in behind the goal with my Bilz or my Chocolito, and sometimes he would glance at me quickly to be sure I was still there, and other times he would ask me, without turning around, what had happened, because that was my father’s main problem as a goalie: it was why he’d never been able to go pro—his myopia was so severe that he could see only as far as the midfield. His reflexes, however, were extraordinary, as was his bravery, which he paid for with two fractures in his right hand and one in his left. During halftime I liked to go and stand in the goalie’s spot, and invariably I’d think about how immense the goal was. Over and over, I wondered how anyone could possibly block a penalty kick. My father blocked penalty kicks—of course he did. One out of every three or four: he never dived for them early; he always waited, and if the execution was anything less than perfect he blocked it. I remember a trip to the country, when Camilo discovered that I blinked between street lights. I still do it, even when I’m driving; I can’t help it. As soon as I get on the highway, I start blinking carefully, trying to hit the exact midpoint between the street lights. That day, we were crowded into the back seat of my parents’ Chevette with my sisters, and Camilo noticed that I was tense, concentrating, and then he started to blink at the same time that I did, smiling at me. I got worried, because I didn’t want to make any mistakes; I fervently believed that only if I blinked between the street lights would we all be kept safe. My nervous habits don’t bother me so much now, but when I was a kid they used to make me so anxious that even the simplest activities became unbearable. I guess I was partly or completely O.C.D. Like many children, I scrupulously avoided the cracks in the sidewalk. If I ever accidentally stepped on one I went into a state of unspeakable despair—and yet I knew, on some level, that it was all too ridiculous to talk about. I also had an obsession with balancing out the parts of my body: if one leg hurt, I’d hit the other one to make them even. Sometimes I’d move my right shoulder to the rhythm of my heartbeats, as if I had two hearts. I had some truly random routines, as well, like going nine times up and down the steep staircase that led from the pool to the park. This wasn’t really so strange—it could have been a kind of game—but I managed to keep it from seeming like one by hiding it carefully: I’d stop at the bottom step, shake my head as if I’d forgotten something, and then turn around and retrace my steps. If I mention all this it’s only because Camilo always seemed willing to help me. That time in the Chevette, when he realized that I was nervous, he patted my hair and said something I don’t remember, but I’m sure that it was warm, caring, and subtle. Sometime later, when I started telling him about my eccentricities, he told me that everyone was different, and maybe the strange things I did were normal, or maybe they weren’t, but it didn’t matter, because normal people stank. I could fill many pages writing about Camilo’s importance in my life. For now, I remember that it was Camilo who, after many long and sophisticated arguments, managed to get me permission to go to my first concert. (We saw Aparato Raro at the Don Orione school in Cerrillos.) He was also the first person to read my poems. “The thing is, you have to really to change.”Buy the print » I’d written poems since I was little, which was, of course, a shameful secret. They weren’t any good, but I thought they were, and when Camilo read them he did so respectfully, though he immediately explained that these days poems didn’t rhyme. That was news to me. I’d never read a poem that didn’t rhyme, and I’d always thought that poetry was something unchanging: ancient and immutable. But it was great to hear, since there were times when it cost me the world to find rhymes, and I knew I couldn’t always fall back on the easy combinations. I asked him what the difference was, then, between a poem and a story. We were stretched out by the pool—in full-on photosynthesis, as he would say. He looked at me with a pedagogical expression and told me that a poem was the exact opposite of a story. “Stories are boring. Poetry is madness, poetry is savage, poetry is a torrent of extreme emotions,” he said, or something like that. It’s difficult not to start inventing, not to let myself be carried along on the scent of memory. He definitely used the words “madness,” “savage,” and “emotions.” “Torrent,” maybe not. I think “extreme,” yes. Back at home, he picked up my notebook and started to write poems himself. It took him maybe half an hour to write ten or twelve long texts, and then he read them to me. I didn’t understand a thing; I asked him if other people understood his poems. He told me that people might not understand them, but that wasn’t the important thing. I asked him if he wanted to publish a book. He told me yes, he was sure he would, but that wasn’t the important thing, either. I asked him what the important thing was. And he said this, or this was what I understood: “The important thing is to express your feelings, and not to be afraid to reveal yourself as a passionate, interesting man, maybe a bit fragile, someone who accepts his feminine side.” That was definitely the first time I heard the expression “feminine side.” Another day, not long after that, he asked me if I liked men or women. I was a bit alarmed, because there were guys I liked—Camilo himself, for example—but I was quite sure that I liked girls more, much more. “I like girls,” I told him. “I like them a lot. I think they’re hot as hell.” “O.K.,” he said, very seriously, and then he added that if I liked guys it was O.K.—that happened sometimes, too. I remember Camilo that afternoon, standing on the bow-shaped bridge in Providencia, smoking. I could tell it was not your usual cigarette, but I didn’t know exactly what it was. “It’s too strong for a kid,” he said in apology when I asked for a drag, because by then I’d started smoking, once in a while. This must have been 1986 or early 1987; I was ten or eleven years old. I know because at that age I still didn’t know my way around Providencia or downtown Santiago very well, and also because later that day we went to buy “True Stories,” by the Talking Heads, which was still a new album then. “We have to solve your problem,” Camilo had told me that morning as we were walking to the bus stop. I asked him which problem, because I thought I had a lot, not just one. “Your shyness,” he replied. “Women don’t like shy men.” And I really was shy back then; I’m talking about a genuine shyness, not the kind you see now, when so many things are blamed on shyness it’s almost a joke. If someone doesn’t say hi, it’s because he’s shy; if a guy kills his wife, it’s because of his shyness; if he cheats a whole town, if he runs for office, if he eats the last bit of Nutella from the jar without asking anyone—shy. No, I’m talking about something else: real stuttering insecurity. “I’m going to help you,” Camilo told me. “I’m going to give you a lesson, but don’t worry, you won’t have to do anything—just don’t leave my side, no matter what I do.” I nodded, feeling a bit dizzy. During the hour-long bus ride, he told me jokes, most of them ones he’d told me before, but this time he told them in a very loud voice, all but shouting. I thought the lesson was that I had to laugh equally loudly, which was very hard for me, but I tried. Then, as we were getting off the bus, he told me that that was not the lesson. We went up onto the bridge and stopped halfway across. Camilo smoked in silence, while I looked down at the murky, rushing water of the river, which was higher than usual. I focussed on the current, until I was so concentrated that I had the feeling that the water was standing still and we were aboard a moving boat, although I’d never been on a boat in my life. I stayed like that for a long time, fifteen, maybe twenty minutes. “We’re on a boat,” I said to Camilo. I had trouble explaining; he didn’t get it, but then suddenly he saw it, too, and he let out a cry of profound astonishment. We went on gazing at the current while he repeated, “Incredible, incredible, incredible.” Afterward, as we were walking toward Providencia, he told me emphatically, “I’ve always liked you a lot, I still like you a lot, but now I respect you, too.” When we got to an intersection, maybe Providencia and Carlos Antúnez, he looked at me, made a subtle, sharp movement with his head that meant now, then threw himself to the ground, clutching his stomach, and started laughing extravagantly, scandalously. A circle of people gathered around us right away, and I did not want to be there, but I understood that this was the lesson. When he finally stopped laughing, there were five policemen there asking him for an explanation. Camilo gave me a nod of approval—I had stayed beside him the whole time, and I had even laughed a little, too. I watched the cops’ faces, impassive and severe, while Camilo rattled off a disjointed explanation in which he talked about me and my shyness, and how it was necessary to teach me this lesson so that I could, he told them, grow. He had disrupted the public order, we were living under a dictatorship, but Camilo managed to placate the policemen, and we walked away after making the strange promise never to laugh in a public place again. “I’m really high,” Camilo said to me, or maybe he said it to himself, a little concerned. We went into a store to buy the Talking Heads album. The place seemed different from any record store I’d been to—everything struck me as luxurious and exclusive. When the sales clerk handed us “True Stories,” Camilo tried to translate for me the opening lyrics of “Love for Sale,” though he didn’t know any English. I took the album from him, examined its red-and-white cover, and then I gave him the same quick gesture he’d given me: now. He barely had time to acknowledge it with a panicked look before I took off with the record in my hands, and we went running, dodging pedestrians at full speed, for a long time, laughing like crazy. That afternoon, when we got home, there was a match. I don’t remember which one, but Colo-Colo was definitely playing, and Camilo stayed to watch it with us. My father asked him why. “I don’t have a father,” Camilo said. “You’re my godfather, so you have to teach me something about soccer. Otherwise,” he warned, winking at me, “I’ll be a fairy.” It became routine for Camilo to watch the games with us, but I don’t know if my dad enjoyed it. The questions Camilo asked were so simple and off-base that, before long, boredom overcame us. On December 4, 1987, I committed a mortal sin. Los Prisioneros had just released “La Cultura de la Basura,” their third album; I was dying to buy it, but I didn’t have a single peso. I considered stealing again, but I didn’t think I could do it—that time with the Talking Heads had been a spontaneous flash of inspiration. Then I had a better idea: since the annual telethon was happening that day, I asked my parents for money to help the handicapped children, and then I headed off to the store and bought the cassette. I had a terrible time of it. I locked myself in my room to listen to the tape, and at first every song sounded, in one way or another, as if it were about my act of villainy. I decided that I had to go to confession, but I was afraid of the priest’s reaction. “Confess to me,” Camilo said, when I told him I felt guilty. “What do you need to go blabbing your business to a priest for? Also, I’ll tell you straight off: masturbating is not a sin. I think even Jesus whacked off a few times thinking about Mary Magdalene.” I laughed so much I felt giddy. Never in my life had I heard such heresy. There was a picture of Jesus above the table in the living room, and from then on I could never look at it without thinking that that was what he looked like after ejaculating. Anyway, I had never thought that masturbation was a sin. When I told Camilo what I had done, he told me that the telethon met its goals through sponsorships alone, and that maybe I had needed that cassette, maybe I had done the right thing. “I don’t understand,” I said. “How’s everything tonight? Can I start you off with a summons for parking on the sidewalk?”Buy the print » “O.K.,” he pronounced. “If you still feel guilty, pray that one prayer where you have to hit your chest.” Camilo still insisted that we teach him about soccer, and sometimes we practiced penalty kicks in the street. But my father would get fed up; he said that Camilo didn’t concentrate, that his interest wasn’t serious. Still, one weekend, the three of us went to the Santa Laura Stadium, to watch a doubleheader. First it was Universidad de Chile against Concepción. Camilo, to my father’s and my annoyance, had decided to root for the U.—which had been his father’s team—although of course he didn’t even know the players’ names. He liked the way that everyone in the stadium criticized and shouted at the players, but he was surprised to see that they got angry with the ref. He decided to come to his defense, and although at first people didn’t take it well, it was truly funny to hear Camilo, every time the ref called a foul or carded a player, stand up and yell, “Very well done, sir! Excellent decision!” Camilo kept cheering on the referee during the next match, which was between Colo-Colo and Naval, I think. I joined him for a while, even though watching Colo-Colo was to me a very serious matter. I had grown up admiring Chino Hisis, Pillo Vera, Carlos Caszely, Horacio Simaldone, and of course Roberto Rojas—el Condor. I had hated some players too: Cristián Saavedra (I don’t know why), and Mario Osbén, but only during the period when the coach inexplicably used to make him and Roberto Rojas alternate as starters. That infuriated me. One of the great joys of my childhood was going down to the fence to yell at the coach, and I’d really let him have it. At home, cursing was strictly forbidden, but at the stadium I had free rein. None of those players were on the team anymore that day at the stadium with Camilo, but the one I missed the most was obviously Condor Rojas. All Chileans admired Rojas, but for me, because he was a goalie, it was also a roundabout way of admiring my father. What’s more, I knew the position perfectly, and I considered the goalie’s job to be without a doubt the hardest. Sometimes I played goalie, too, trying to emulate Condor Rojas, or maybe my father (in all but the shouting). Still, when I joined the Cobresal Youth leagues, in Maipú, playing on the same field where Iván Zamorano began his career, I tried out as a midfielder and not a goalie. I was afraid, perhaps, that I wouldn’t be good enough. Why did Camilo spend so much time with us? Because we loved him, sure. And because he didn’t like being at his own house. He fought with his mother about his religious beliefs and about the political situation. Before the 1988 referendum, Camilo went to all the demonstrations in favor of the “No” vote, and that led to severe arguments. He wanted “No” to win because he hated Pinochet, but also because he thought that if it did his father would come back to Chile. But Camilo’s father didn’t want to come back, or at least that’s what Auntie July always told him—“Your father has another family now. He has another country. He doesn’t even remember you.” But Camilo’s father still wrote to him, sent him money, and called him every once in a while. Auntie July was tough. Even so, she treated us very well the one time we went over to her house. She gave us bread cake and banana milk while we played Montezuma’s Revenge with Camilo’s half-brothers. It was strange to see Camilo there. He didn’t seem to belong. I went into his room, and it was as if he didn’t live there. He used to give my sisters and me posters and pictures to hang on our walls, but there was none of that in his own room: I was impressed by those white, empty walls, without even a nail to hang a photograph. Oh, what did Camilo study? Administration or Management of Something, at the Universidad Tecnológica Metropolitana, which was then called the Instituto Profesional de Santiago. But he didn’t like to study. Once, he tried to give me math lessons, but it didn’t work out, and, anyway, I didn’t really need them. Nor do I know if he read much, though I feel like he did. Now I sometimes think, from this suspiciously stable place that is the present, that Camilo was immature. But no. He wasn’t. Or he also had another side, an intuitive, generous, perceptive side. He was there with us, in front of the TV, when Condor Rojas faked his injury in Brazil and the Chilean team walked off the field at the Maracaná Stadium. My father and I couldn’t believe what we were seeing, and Camilo was distraught, too. “Fucking Brazilians!” I shouted, to see if I’d be scolded, but no one scolded me. My father sank into furious silence. Camilo immediately set off downtown, and he was part of the crowd that protested in front of the Brazilian Embassy. I wanted to go with him, but my parents wouldn’t let me, and I had to swallow my rage. One evening, while the subject was still being debated and Condor Rojas was still giving interviews in which he proclaimed his innocence, Camilo came over to eat with us and said that he no longer believed that Condor was innocent. By then the rumors were already circulating, but my father and I considered them defamatory. My father looked at Camilo with contempt, almost with hatred. “You don’t have the right to an opinion. You don’t know anything about soccer,” he told him. “Do you really think that Condor would be stupid enough to do something like that?” When Rojas finally confessed, not long after that, we had to accept it. We apologized to Camilo then, but he said he didn’t think it was at all important. Even after Condor had admitted his guilt, for months I refused to believe it. But eventually we had to stop admiring Condor Rojas, and I also stopped going to my father’s games. Soon after that my father broke his right hand for the second time, and the doctor told him that he should never play soccer again. In mid-1990, something marvellous happened: after a decade of requesting a telephone line, we finally got one. We were given the number 5573317. The morning they came to install it, I was home alone with my mother. The first thing she did was call one of her girlfriends, and then she told me that I should call one of my friends, too, so I called Camilo. It was during a period when he had, without explanation, stopped coming to visit. He sounded happy, and I asked him to come see us. He appeared a few days later. I was fourteen by then, and that day he told me he wanted to teach me how to talk to girls. I had already kissed a few girls, but my relations with them were not easy. Camilo said that he’d recently met a girl called Lorena, and they’d gone out on a date and had slept together. He explained how one should treat a woman in bed (“You have to take her clothes off slowly—you can’t rush it”), and he offered to call Lorena, while I listened in from my mother’s room. “That way you can learn how a guy seduces a woman,” he said. He was not showing off—he really did want to teach me. “Hi, Lorena, it’s Camilo,” he said, in a deep voice. “Oh, how are you?” Her voice was sweet, sweet and a little hoarse. “I’m good, but I need to see you.” She was quiet for five seconds, and then she pronounced a sentence that I will never forget. “Well, if it’s already a necessity, we’ll just end it here,” she said, and hung up. I went to the kitchen, put the kettle on, and made a cup of tea for Camilo. I think it was the first time I ever made tea for someone. I put a lot of sugar in it, which was what I understood you did when making tea for someone who was sad. “Thanks,” Camilo said, with a gesture of resignation. “But it doesn’t matter. I’m happy. Next summer something very important is going to happen.” “What?” “Well, it won’t be summer for me. It’ll be winter.” It was a perfect clue, but I still didn’t understand. How stupid. “I’m going to France to see my father,” he said, the excitement clear in his face. Now I jump ahead many years; more precisely, twenty-two. It’s October of 2012. I’m in Amsterdam, at a gathering of Chileans, most of them exiles, some of them the children of exiles, others students. And there is Big Camilo, Camilo, Sr. Someone introduces us and when he hears my last name I notice the interest in his eyes. “You look like your father,” he tells me. “Mrs. Robinson, are you trying to get me to listen to your podcast?”Buy the print » “And you look like Camilo,” I answer. He asks me some vague questions. We talk about the protests, about the shameful official refusal to allow Chileans abroad to vote in elections. We talk about Piñera, and suddenly we are compatriots spelling out the incompetence of their President. And then: “How is Hernán?” he asks me. “Good,” I say, thinking that it’s been a while since I’ve talked to my father. I feel a little bullied, I don’t know why. I treat him coldly. Then I realize: Camilo suffered so much because of his father. I feel that, in some dark and absurd way, by talking to Big Camilo I am betraying my friend, my brother. At the same time, I want to talk to this man, to understand who he is. I suggest that we meet up the next day. We agree to meet at a Mexican restaurant on Keizersgracht. It’s a short walk from my hotel. I arrive almost two hours early so that I can watch the Barcelona game. Alexis is on the bench. For decades now, soccer has been an individual sport for us Chileans. After what happened with Condor Rojas, not only were we out of Italy in ’90, we were also forbidden to participate in the South American qualifiers for the ’94 World Cup U.S.A. There was nothing for us to do, for years, but focus on the local competition and on the individual triumphs and failures of our few countrymen who played outside Chile. We rooted for Real Madrid when Zamorano was there, and now we root for Barcelona, with Alexis, for as long as that lasts (if it lasts). We’re used to this way of watching: what do the goals that David Villa and Messi score matter to me? The only thing I care about is that they put Alexis in, and, even if he doesn’t shine, may he at least not do anything dumb. Big Camilo also arrives early. I think, I’m going to watch a match with Camilo’s dad. All I know about Big Camilo, about his exile, is what his son told me: that he was imprisoned in 1974, and that he had the good luck, so to speak, to get out of Chile in ’75. He went to Paris, and soon he met an Argentine woman, with whom he had two children. He tells me that he has been in Holland for fifteen years, first in Utrecht, then in Rotterdam, and now in a small town close to Amsterdam. Before long, like a policeman who doesn’t want to waste time, I speed up the investigation. I ask him why Camilo was so changed when he came back to Chile. “I don’t know why,” he tells me. “He came to Paris to find me. He wanted us to go back to Chile together. He wasn’t interested in moving here, though I asked him to. He told me he was Chilean. I proposed that he come to study. I talked about our plans to settle in Holland. He told me he didn’t like studying, not in Santiago and not in Europe. It got more and more heated. He said horrible things to me. I said horrible things to him. And it became a competition, a competition of who could say the most horrible things. I ended up feeling that he had won. And he ended up feeling that I had won. All those years we’d been in contact, I’d thought about him, I’d sent him money—not much, but I’d sent it. Later, the first time I went back to Chile, we saw each other, we had lunch several times, but we always fought.” “That was in ’92,” I say. “Yes,” he replies. Fifteen minutes into the second half, Alexis goes in; he’s offside a couple of times, but he plays a small part in Xavi’s 3–0 goal. Then Fábregas scores, and then Messi again. Alexis misses an easy goal in the final minutes. “What do you think of Alexis?” Big Camilo asks me. “That he’s not better than Messi,” I say, and he smiles. I add that he was never much for scoring goals—in Chile he missed goals all the time—but that he was an exceptional winger. Suddenly I have that thought again: I’m talking about soccer with Camilo’s father, and I feel a kind of tremor. A very strange feeling. I talk about the 2006 Colo-Colo team. I talk about Claudio Borghi, about Mati Fernández, about Chupete Suazo, Kalule, Arturo Sanhueza. I talk about that terrible finals match against Pachuca, at the National Stadium. I feel awkward talking this way. Naïve. He insists that I use the informal “you” with him. I tell him no. He asks me if my father and Camilo used the informal with each other. I say yes. “Use it with me, then.” I’d rather not. I try to answer politely, but the only thing that comes out is a weak, murmured “No.” I ask him what he and my father fought about. My dad had never wanted to tell me or Camilo when we asked him: he always changed the subject. And no one else knew. I always assumed it was something very serious. “It was toward the end of the season,” Big Camilo tells me. “We had it all sewn up, two-nil: I was playing center defense, there were only a few minutes left, and your dad was shouting like crazy: ‘Pass it, pass it back, pass it, Camilo!’ We’d been fighting about that for several games. He never let me make my own decisions. ‘Pass it, pass it back!’ In those days, the goalie was still allowed to pick the ball up with his hands when you passed it back to him.” “I remember,” I tell him. “I’m not that young.” “You are very young,” he tells me. We order more beers. He goes on, “He kept saying it over and over. ‘Pass it back, Camilo, come on!’ And I was fed up. Out of pure spite I put the ball in the corner and scored a goal on my own team—‘There’s your ball, motherfucker!’ I told him. Some people laughed, others yelled at me, your father just looked at me with hate. And then the other team scored, and we tied. If I hadn’t scored that own goal, we could have won the championship.” Just then my Dutch friend Luc arrives; he has some books to give me. I introduce him to Camilo. He sits with us for a few minutes, and in his extravagant Spanish he asks Camilo if he’s an exile. “Not anymore,” Camilo answers. “Or yes. I don’t know anymore.” Luc wants me to leave with him, but I feel like I should stay. I tell him we’ll meet up later. Big Camilo had told his son that he was never tortured, even though he was held prisoner for several months. “They beat the shit out of me,” he says to me now. “But I don’t want to talk about that. I’m alive. I got to leave, start over again.” We both fall silent, thinking about Camilo. I think of the record shop, the song by the Talking Heads; maybe I hum it a little. “I was born in a house with the television always on / Guess I grew up too fast / And I forgot my name.” Now we are walking along Prinsengracht. It’s cold. Without meaning to, I start to count the bicycles that are going by on the street at breakneck speed. Fifty, sixty, a hundred. The silence seems definitive. I sense that we’re about to say goodbye. And, sure enough, just then he says, “Well, I’ll be going now.” “Tell Hernán I’m sorry,” he adds. I assure him that my father forgave him many years ago, that it’s not important. We ask a boy to take our picture with my phone. As we pose, I think about how tomorrow I’m going to call my father, and we’ll talk for a long time about Big Camilo, and we’ll also remember, as we do sometimes, the horrendous night in early ’94, when Auntie July called to tell us that Camilo had been hit by a car, and the wretched week when he almost pulled through it but didn’t pull through. I don’t know why I ask Big Camilo how he learned of his son’s death. “I found out eight days later,” he says. “July knew how to contact me, but she didn’t want to.” We’re standing, staring at the ground, on a corner by a lamp store. I’ve seen this several times in Amsterdam: shopwindows filled with lamps that are all turned on at night. I’m about to tell him this, to change the subject. Then he repeats, “Please tell Hernán I’m sorry about that goal.” “I’ll tell him,” I reply. When we say goodbye, he hugs me and starts to cry. I think that the story can’t end like that, with Camilo, Sr., crying for his dead son, his son who was practically a stranger to him. But that’s how it ends.

“Hey, sweetheart, nice patoot,” says the sad-eyed taxi-driver sitting at the all-night-diner counter, a doughnut wallowing in his unshaven jowls. The waitress glares at him. She is fed up with being ogled, or else stared at in disgust, whenever she bends over to pick up a dishrag. “If a goat wandered in, they’d ogle the goat and say the same stupid things,” she complains to the old bag lady near the cash register, to whom she has offered a free bowl of hot soup. “I’m sick of it. I wish nobody could ever look at me.” The bag lady turns out to be a fairy godmother in disguise, and, in thanks for the soup, she raises her spoon like a wand and grants the waitress her wish, so that when she tries to hand the taxi-driver his check, his head swivels sharply on his bovine neck. Is he refusing it? The waitress moves over into his line of sight and his head pops the other way. “Jesus, that hurt,” he whimpers. She glances over at the bag lady, but the sweet old thing has vanished. People turn away from then on—they just can’t stop themselves. Whisk, whisk, whisk, go their heads as she passes by. Sometimes they make little yipping sounds, which adds to her amusement. She likes to stroll through busy department stores, city parks, and railway stations at rush hour, watching the heads snap away in choral waves. Sometimes, just for fun, she takes her clothes off, remembering her thrill as a child undressing in front of her bedroom window, but then, catching sight of her reflection in a shopwindow (the mannequins stare icily, straight at her), she sees what a silly fat fool she is and stops that. At the diner, her boss, head twisting away, hands her a few small bills and tells her she’s become a literal pain in the neck, the customers are complaining, she’ll have to go—which brings to mind all those cautionary admonitions about being careful what you wish for. So, jobless, she heads to a bar to get as drunk as she can on her cheapskate boss’s payoff, wishing she could find someone to tell her troubles to who wouldn’t turn away. Outside the bar, she comes upon a guy who does keep looking at her, a beardy panhandler, slumped against the building clutching a brown paper bag and a tin cup. Has the spell worn off? No, she guesses it at once: he is blind. She’s not sure, but maybe she has just used up a second wish, because, glancing over her shoulder, she sees the backside of the old bag lady, toddling away around a corner. She takes the blind beggar home with her, as if he were something she’d won in a raffle, feeds and showers him, and they have a good time for a few hours. “Ample” is his favorable judgment after doing the Braille thing. But then she has to think about what happens next. She has no job now and two mouths to feed, two bodies to clothe and care for. His tin cup was empty, the bottle in his brown paper bag as well—his own career, like hers, has been going nowhere. Maybe that old homeless lady could help if she could find her. She may have used up two wishes already and, if so, has essentially wasted them both, but, if the legends are true, she still has a third. If she finds the bag lady, she’ll have to be careful, given the old dear’s wicked sense of humor. Wishing to live forever, for example, might be a nightmarishly bad choice. No need to wish for beauty if no one can see her, and perfect health’s no good if she’s condemned to poverty. So she decides to wish for fabulous wealth, and to keep on repeating it, so as not to blurt out something stupid and end up like that couple who wished their noses into sausages. She checks the streets near the diner where she first saw her, wishing her money wish over and over, but the bag lady is nowhere to be seen. Finally, she gives up and heads instead to a liquor store to use up her last couple of bills in the best way possible, passing a bank where, by chance, a robbery is taking place. The heads of the thieves snap aside so violently when they rush out of the bank door toward her that they stumble and drop what they’re carrying, spilling it out on the street. There are sirens, the thieves are on the run, and the money’s there for the taking, piles of it. She wouldn’t even have to waste a wish. Then she realizes that, on the contrary, she has just used up her last one. Somewhere, the old bird is laughing again. If the waitress grabs up the stolen loot, she’ll be on everybody’s most-wanted list, but if she walks away the granting of her final wish will be recklessly wasted. She looks up and sees that the security cameras have snapped away from her and hang by their wires. A handful of the scattered bills would never be missed, but a handful is not what she wished for; if she pinched a little she might be in more trouble than if she took it all. A couple of large grimy shopping bags come floating past on a sudden breeze, dancing to the tune of the wailing sirens. The bag lady is still taking care of her. Or teasing her. The waitress fills them, but there’s money left over. Her skirt and shirt and underclothes can all be tied into bags, so she takes them off, knots them, and loads them up, too. There’s more now than she can drag home on her own, but when she tries to hail a taxi the drivers can’t see her, for all there is to see. Luckily, she finds a guy snoozing in his parked cab. Did she wish for that? Looks like he might be the same unshaven yo-yo who was in the diner the night it all began. She heaves the bags of money into the back seat, crawls in beside them, and gives the driver, who wakes with a snort, her address. He tries to see what she has brought in with her, but his head keeps bouncing away. “Oh, oh,” he grunts, reaching for the door. “Wait!” she says, and drops some big bills onto the seat beside him. It’s probably more raw cash than he’s ever seen before. With an appreciative whistle, he pulls the door shut and asks for that address again. It’s not easy getting there. Other drivers’ heads, glancing their way, snap to the side, and up and down the street there are accidents. Her guy is ducking, dodging, cursing. “Hey, it’s a dangerous world,” she says, squatting down behind the front seat to make it easier for him, and he laughs sourly at that. At home, she’ll wrestle the bags in somehow, then call up for pizza delivery and a case or two from the liquor store, put some music on, and she and the blind beggar will dance the night away. It won’t exactly be happily ever after, but the bag lady never promised her that.

At nine o’clock one morning in June, Captain Popov rang the doorbell. No one answered for a long time, but finally he heard the sound of scurrying. “Who’s there? Who is it?” a plaintive female voice said. The door opened a crack, the chain left on. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko shifted their weight, itching to start, finish, and get out of there as fast as they could. They were incompetent boys. Popov pushed his I.D. through the crack in the door. He heard more scurrying, and then it finally opened. The witness, one of their own, from the municipal housing office, stomped in first. “Does Boris Ivanovich Muratov live here?” Popov asked. Muratov flashed into the room immediately—a large, bearded man of around forty in a blue robe that might have been velvet. We don’t make robes like that here, Popov thought with disgust. Where do they get this stuff? “Your passport, please,” Popov said. Just then, Muratov’s wife came out, in a matching blue robe. “Familiarize yourself with this document, please,” Popov said, and held out the search warrant. He wouldn’t let Muratov hold it, forcing him to study it from a distance. “If I may!” Muratov stretched out his hand. Popov snatched the document away. “What’s there to read? It’s a search warrant, I can tell you that myself.” “I can tell that it’s a warrant, but there’s no stamp on it.” “Oh, hell!” Popov grew angry. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? A warrant is a warrant—it’ll get a stamp, I can assure you.” “You can come back when you get the stamp,” Boris Ivanovich retorted insolently. “I would be a little more polite if I were you. It isn’t good for us to get on each other’s bad side. If you will, please, let me do my work.” “Just a minute,” Muratov said, retreating into a little room. Popov knew the layout of the apartment. It was always the same, he thought: the hall, the room behind the hall, then the closet where they kept everything he was looking for. Muratov returned with a thick, yellowed piece of paper on official letterhead bearing the profile of the “greatest of all men.” It read “Letter of Commendation.” Muratov thrust the document right under the Captain’s nose, holding it so close that Popov couldn’t read it. Muratov’s wife, pale against her blue robe, looked at her husband imploringly. His mother-in-law, Maria Nikolaevna, poured tea as if nothing out of the ordinary were happening. “Read it from where I hold it, please,” Muratov said. “From where I hold it.” The Captain read it. He understood. He walked away and took his boys with him. Muratov threw his salvation document aside. Maria Nikolaevna set a teacup and a sandwich on a plate in front of Boris Ivanovich. Muratov loved his mother-in-law, in whom he saw traces of his wife, Natasha, although the mother was more decisive. He also saw his mother-in-law in his wife: the beginnings of plumpness, the future folds along the sides of her mouth, and a soft second chin. Natasha picked the document up off the floor. “What is this, Boris?” Boris gestured toward the ceiling—they’re listening. “Well, Natashenka, I got that certificate because in my modelling plant I fabricated the sarcophagus of the leader and teacher of all eras and peoples, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Take a look at the signature. The powers that be are eternally in my debt.” Maria Nikolaevna smiled. Natasha placed her white hands on her even whiter neck. “What now?” she asked meekly. “Would you pour me another cup of tea, Maria Nikolaevna?” he asked, clinking his cup. Natasha sat down, unable to come to her senses. Muratov embraced his wife. She picked up a pencil and some scrap paper and wrote, “You’re going to be arrested.” “I’m going to leave in half an hour,” he wrote back. Then he ripped up the paper and set it on fire. He waited for the flames to graze his fingertips, and then threw the remains in the ashtray. He picked up a fresh piece of paper and wrote “train station” and showed it to Natasha and Maria Nikolaevna. “Right now,” Muratov said. “Alone?” Natasha asked. Muratov nodded. Then Muratov went into the closet and took out the folder that held what Captain Popov had come for. He removed a stack of illustrated pages and returned to the kitchen. Muratov took a baking sheet from the oven, placed several pieces of paper on it, and brought a match to them. Maria Nikolaevna grabbed the match out of his hand. “How many times have I asked you, Boris Ivanovich, to leave the household duties to me.” Maria Nikolaevna squeezed into the corridor, where she lifted up the edge of the worn linoleum. She pushed the drawings under the linoleum and then inserted the edge of the strip back under the threshold. “He’s lost his mind, he’s lost his mind,” Natasha said. Her mother pointed at the phone—like Boris, she was convinced that they were listening. Loudly, she said, “Boris, I’m going to make you meat patties for lunch, all right?” Twenty minutes later, Muratov left the house by the back door. He had shaved his beard but left the mustache. He went through the courtyard, which had been flooded by a storm the night before. Broken branches stuck up from an enormous puddle, which Boris trudged through, carrying a large shopping bag that held a change of linens, a sweater, his favorite little pillow, and every bit of money that there was in the house. Sivtsev and Emelyanenko, who had been left outside the front door, sat on the bench smoking, trying to decide whether to go and get some beer. Captain Popov came back with the necessary stamp at ten-fifteen. Natasha opened the door immediately and said that Muratov had gone to work. Popov threw a fiery glance at his goons. “But he doesn’t work! What’s his job?” His mother-in-law intervened: “He’s an artist. He doesn’t go to an office, but he works a lot. You saw yourself—he constructed Lenin’s sarcophagus.” “He’s been fired since then,” Popov said. Maria Nikolaevna rebuffed him: “So he went out to look for work.” “Will he be back for lunch?” the Captain asked. “Of course he will.” They’d bought the story about the meat patties. They hadn’t dragged their feet bugging the apartment! “He asked me to make him meat. We’re expecting him back soon.” The Captain got to work sorting through mountains of papers. The samizdat was the stuff that everyone had; anyway, it wasn’t samizdat Popov had come for. The Captain was looking for drawings that were already lying on his desk, in the form of photocopies from Stern, the West German magazine. One was a caricature with giant letters that spelled “Glory to the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.” The letters were made out of bologna, and under the letters was a crowd of people and dogs trying to get up close to them. There was even a price tag hanging from the letters: “2 rub. 20 kop.” Another caricature showed the mausoleum, also made out of bologna, but with “Lenin” written in hot dogs. Agents had searched for the artist for a long time before uncovering his identity. The final touch was getting the originals, or something that resembled them. Captain Popov stayed until late that evening. He confiscated three sacks of samizdat, but the drawings were never found. “Just because I have thick skin doesn’t mean I’m not sensitive.”Buy the print » By then, Muratov was at the house of an old woman who had been trying to sell green onions and parsley at the Kimry port. All she’d come home with was a traveller who’d missed the last boat to Novo-Okatovo. Muratov paid a ruble to spend the night in a small barn, sleeping on a bale of hay covered with a sheet. At dawn, he washed up at the well and took the 6 A.M. ferry. The old woman turned out to be a saint—she never reported him. That evening, he was in the distant and inaccessible village of Danilovy Gorki, sitting in an old peasant house that belonged to his friend Nikolai Mikhailovich, who was also an artist. He explained his situation and asked if he could stay either there or in the bathhouse for a period of time, posing as a cousin or something of the sort. Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his head and groaned, but didn’t refuse him. That’s how Boris Ivanovich’s life on the run began. Danilovy Gorki wasn’t so much a village as a tiny settlement of five houses. One was Nikolai Mikhailovich’s; another was abandoned, empty since the death of its owner, two years earlier; the other three housed summer vacationers along with their year-round owners. Hardly anyone stayed on for September. Nikolai Mikhailovich’s mother had come from an aristocratic line, and his father was a priest who had been executed in 1937. Thus, Nikolai was always prepared. He said that it would be safe to stay for the summer, while there were plenty of strangers around, but afterward Boris would be dangerously visible. Nikolai Mikhailovich’s house was packed with people. Children, the elderly, two single female relatives, and some long-term house guests. Everyone did a bit of work, though it wasn’t compulsory. They were busy from morning till night, but they were also free. For Boris, country life was a novelty. He was a city man. His grandfather had been a serf who started working at Sytin’s print shop in 1883. And his father was a skilled proletarian artisan, a true Muscovite. Before his escape, Boris had never even laid eyes on a village. Suddenly, the beauty of the secluded little settlement opened up before him. Danilovy Gorki stood on the banks of a large river, among swamps and forests. His hosts, the descendants of an aristocratic family, were also to his liking. They had never known palaces or had a whiff of luxury, having spent half a century between poverty and destitution, exile and prison. Those who’d survived were hardy. They had become so simple that they didn’t even know any foreign languages. Nonetheless, there was still something special about them, even if Boris Ivanovich couldn’t quite put his finger on it. Nikolai’s daughters stirred kasha on the stove, baked hearth cakes, worked in the garden, and washed the linens in the river. His grandsons caught fish, and his granddaughters and the two aunts foraged for berries and mushrooms. All of them sketched, sang, and put on plays for the little ones. Soon after Boris’s arrival, Nikolai Mikhailovich’s loud and restless cousin Anastasia came to stay for three days. She immediately set her sights on Boris Ivanovich. He was a tempting and easy mark; they lost no time, although their first night together would have lasted longer if the whole family hadn’t spent so much time singing at the table. Anastasia was a good singer, with a kind of Gypsy chic in her voice. She had small, girlish breasts and a long nose, and was not as beautiful as his wife. But Boris remembered her for a long time afterward; she seemed to have purified him completely, picked him down to bone and tendon and then put him back together. Boris didn’t remember ever having had that kind of power and stamina. Anastasia, a doctor, left by boat on the fourth day of their affair, since she had a twenty-four-hour shift at the hospital, where she was the head of her department. The whole family saw her off, and as they stood on the shore she sang “Marusenka Washed Her White Feet” and waved to them with her handkerchief from the boat. She’s so educated. But such a slut! Boris Ivanovich thought, both impressed and confused. As though he’d read his friend’s mind, Nikolai Mikhailovich told him, “That’s in Nastya’s blood. Her great-grandmother or great-great-grandmother fooled around with Pushkin.” On Transfiguration Day, they all went to church in Kashino. First by ferry, then by bus. The trip was exhausting. “Your life is so anti-Soviet,” he remarked in admiration. “No, Boris, it’s just a-Soviet,” Nikolai Mikhailovich said, laughing. All summer, Boris watched the sun rise and the water lap the sandbank, which was covered in the empty mussel shells and decorative grasses that he had previously seen only on icons. He hadn’t known that they really existed; moved by everything he saw, he was happy. Everyone foraged for mushrooms in the forest. There weren’t many in July, but by August they sprouted up after the sweet rain showers. The days were long, the evenings, with their endless tea drinking, were pleasant, and the nights passed in an instant. He fell asleep and woke up in the same moment, as though nothing had happened. A month and half had gone by, and he still had no news from home; he did not seek out ways to get in touch with his wife. He was more comfortable not imagining how worried she was about him—her desires, anxieties, and fears. A relative of Nikolai Mikhailovich’s tossed a single postcard from Boris Ivanovich into a Moscow mailbox. The card said everything is fine, don’t worry, I love you and miss you. In August, Nikolai Mikhailovich’s wife, the daughter of a famous Russian artist, came to the house with their oldest son, Kolya. Her daughters buzzed around her, doting on her as if she were an honored guest, all “Mamochka, Mamochka,” while Kolya, who was thirty years old, tailed his father wherever he went. Boris Ivanovich, who was a virulent opponent of child-rearing, began to doubt his beliefs. Long ago, he had decided that giving birth in this inhumane and shameless state—into a meaningless life of poverty and filth—should not be done. He had told Natasha that this was his condition for marrying her. Their marriage had lasted for eight years, and the problem wasn’t that she wanted children. She lacked a sense of humor—or maybe the way that her husband’s mind worked had begun to wear her down. She cringed at his drawings as they became angrier and more acrid. Compared with other couples, they had been rather well off. He had graduated from the crafts department of the Stroganov school. Because he was a fabricator, he made more money than the “real” artists at the plant; he got bigger orders—for, say, a thousand rubles. Sometimes he worked off the books, as an assistant to famous artists. He helped create the decorative metalwork for various palaces of culture, those for railways or metalworking; no matter the trade, the culture was always socialist. This work filled him with a rage that manifested in increasingly acerbic caricatures of the socialist life, which was allegedly always on the verge of transforming into a Communist utopia. His love for drawing had intensified. He was invited to participate in an art show in someone’s apartment. Many people admired his drawings. His first real success depicted the statue “Worker and a Kolkhoz Woman” made out of bologna. Thanks to his friend Ilya, this bologna made it to West Germany and was published in Stern. After that, Boris grew indifferent to filling his large orders, preferring to spend time sketching. In Danilovy Gorki, Muratov lost all interest in drawing bologna. There was none in the village, and no one missed it. The quiet sketches of gentle nature that Nikolai Mikhailovich’s entire clan, young and old, loved to make were similarly unappealing to Boris Ivanovich. He ended up not drawing anything all summer long. “How much do we have to leave to avoid a social-media incident?”Buy the print » September was coming, and people started preparing to return to the city. They filled pillowcases with mushrooms and put raspberries and wild strawberries in the oven to dry. That year, they didn’t make jam. There wasn’t enough sugar, and, besides, jars were tough to transport. They stashed pickles and mushrooms in the cellar and buried the early potatoes. When their departure was imminent, Nikolai Mikhailovich finally asked, “So you’re set on spending the winter here, Boris Ivanovich?” “I’m scared, Nikolai Mikhailovich. Not of the police. I’m scared of your stove, your house. These are the kinds of things you have to have known about since childhood. It seems like it’s too late for me to learn them.” Nikolai Mikhailovich scratched his meagre beard, fell silent for a moment, and then made a proposal. “Baba Nura’s vacationers have left, and she’s gotten rather feeble in the past year. You should stay at her place. I’ll talk to her. You can help her through the winter. I’ll come in December. God willing, you’ll survive until then.” Muratov assigned Nikolai Mikhailovich two tasks in Moscow. The first was to go to Muratov’s house sometime—without calling ahead or providing any warning—and give his wife and his mother-in-law a letter from him, but not tell them where he was. The second was to meet with Muratov’s friend Ilya and say a single word: “Forward.” Ilya would know what it meant. Before returning to the country in December, he should meet with Ilya again, take the money that Ilya would bring, and give half of it to Muratov’s family; the other half he should bring back to Muratov. He did not know how much money there would be—maybe there would be a lot, maybe not very much, maybe nothing at all. Muratov moved in with Nura, a stooped-over old lady with a crooked little face, gnarled fingers, and giant, hideous wrists that she held in front of her chest when she walked. It seemed as if she were always carrying a cup or a pot. Her wrists never unbent, and she used her hands as though they were two large claws. In exchange for letting Muratov live with her, she asked not for money but for vodka. The old woman turned out to have a passion for drinking, and was a merry hooligan. She woke up early in the morning, crawled out of her cot with a loud creak, crossed herself in the holy place in the corner where there was a large blackened icon, and then tossed back her first thimbleful. At noon, she had her second. In the middle of the day, she would eat kasha or potatoes. Later, three thimblefuls would serve as a replacement for all other necessary fats, proteins, and carbohydrates. Nura went through a bottle a week, a ration she had established years earlier. In the morning, she was barely there, but by evening she was full of life and even did some housework, all the while muttering gibberish under her breath. Several years before, the village had got radio and electricity. Nura ignored the electricity—she never turned on the light, going to bed when it got dark and getting up when the sun rose—but she took a liking to the radio. When Muratov finally learned how to decipher the old woman’s stream of babble, he discovered that it was a merciless running commentary on the radio programs she listened to in the morning. “Listen, lodger, that new Stalin they have today, they praise him so highly, he’ll be even worse than the old one,” she once said to Boris Ivanovich. “Why is that?” “The old one took everything, and now this one is picking at the leftovers. Oh, they liberated us from everything, those dearies. First they freed me from my land, then from my husband, my children, my cow, and my chickens. Now they’ll liberate me from vodka, and I’ll finally be completely free.” Nura’s husband had perished in 1930, during collectivization. Her three sons, who came of age toward the beginning of the war, had died in combat one after another—the eldest in ’41, the middle in ’42, and the youngest in ’45. “And they liberated us from God,” she mumbled, peering toward the darkness of her altar. “Although perhaps He decided to cast us off Himself. Who can tell . . . ” Some evenings, her neighbors would stop by: Marfa and Zinaida, both of them younger than Nura but just as bitter. They drank Boris Ivanovich’s tea, and Nura bragged to them, “God sent me a goodly lodger. He brings me vodka, puts the tea on.” It had been ages since Boris Ivanovich had thought about the bologna drawings. In the village, mass-produced meat products had completely lost their symbolism, like long-forgotten relics. The old women here could not afford to take the train to Moscow just to buy bologna, and they wouldn’t have seen an orange as long as they lived had it not been for Nikolai Mikhailovich bringing them such unheard-of curios from time to time. Muratov started drawing the old women and their surroundings. In the midst of this poverty and squalor, a treasure trove materialized before his eyes. The crooked little potatoes cooked in their skins, the pickles disfigured in their barrels, and all the mushrooms—from the little slippery Jacks to the ugly milkcaps. The queen of the spread was a cloudy bottle of hooch, stopped with a homemade cork. Sometimes, if they were lucky, it was vodka. In winter, bread wasn’t delivered to the store in the larger settlement of Kruzhilino, which was six kilometres away from Gorki, so the old women took turns baking. Boris Ivanovich quickly went through all the paper in Nikolai Mikhailovich’s house. Then he found ten rolls of wallpaper intended for the attic. The redecorating had been put off for several years before being abandoned entirely. At first, he drew on the back of the paper, and then he started drawing on the front, which provided his drawings with a stippled yellow background that made the old women’s faces come alive. They were the last people remaining in the village: worn out as their old clothes, humble as the potatoes that were their only food, and free as the clouds. Drinking cheered them up. They would sing, reminisce, and laugh, covering their toothless mouths with their blackened fingers. There were two teeth among the three of them. Toothaches were treated with sage and nettles. Leshka, the village shepherd, had been the only one who could extract teeth, and after he died their remaining teeth had fallen out of their own accord. Boris Ivanovich drew his sitters in thin pencil lines, with their amazing conversations flowing out of their mouths in ribbons. What stories they told! They talked about how, before the war, the Party bosses had showed up to incorporate everyone into a kolkhoz, and the people protested and protested but finally signed up, having nowhere else to turn. Nura’s impish eldest son, Nikolai, played a trick on the bosses with some spoiled eggs. There had been a hen who was so clever at nesting that it was hard to take her eggs away. They would go bad and explode in her hiding spots, and you couldn’t get rid of the stink for a month afterward. Nikolai found some unexploded eggs to put into the newcomers’ wagon so that they would sit on them with their fattened asses. You wouldn’t believe it, but the very first boss who sat down broke the rotten egg. There was a quiet shooting sound, and the stench spread through the whole town. It was so funny! “I’ll be walking by your door in a second if you want to try to get my attention.”Buy the print » They reminisced about their husbands and fought over unsettled scores. Marfa reminded Zinaida that she’d messed with her man in 1926. Zinaida retorted that Leshka the shepherd stole milk from other people’s cows. Leshka happened to be Marfa’s brother, and she didn’t take kindly to the accusation. Their argument escalated until Nura sang a dirty little ditty about who snuck into where, and both of the women laughed. Again, they cast their minds back to things that had happened long ago but were not forgotten. About the “Communits” who had starved the village and taken away its men. Periodically, they would fall silent and knock back a thimbleful; then they’d laugh and drink some more. Snow fell, and the poverty and dejection of the sodden and stormy autumn months were replaced by a white winter, which stayed with Boris Ivanovich as a bright patch, a sunny idyll in his gray life. He spent the few available daylight hours wandering around the village. The swamps had frozen over, and you could go farther out on them than before. There was so much snow that it reached over his felt boots. One day, upon returning home, he found all the old women making a fuss in the front yard. They had decided to undertake a major cleaning on the occasion of the following day’s holiday. “It’s the Feast of the Presentation of Mary,” they told Boris Ivanovich. Presentation to what or whom they couldn’t explain. But they had decided to wash themselves. It had been a long time. The last time they had bathed was for the Feast of the Intercession, when the first snow had fallen. Nikolai Mikhailovich had the only decent bathhouse; the old women’s bathhouses had all fallen apart long ago. But there was so much snow in Nikolai Mikhailovich’s yard that it would have taken a day to clear it. They decided to wash in Nura’s house. Boris Ivanovich wheeled in the tub, brought them water from the well, chopped enough firewood to fill the entire porch, and brought it inside. In the morning, they started heating the water. It got so hot in the house that the little glass panes in the windows wept with condensation, cleaning themselves as well. Everything was ready to go—they had even steamed the birch switches—and then it occurred to them: where would the lodger go? Even the goat was freezing in the yard. How could they kick him out? You couldn’t hide him in the stove—he’d burn up. The house didn’t have separate areas, and there were no walls, only a hiding place behind the stove. He wouldn’t dare to look from behind there. Then they laughed: What would this stud want with our old bones? They put Boris Ivanovich behind the stove and strung up a curtain. He sat there with a book, but he didn’t read. The lamplight was hardly brighter than a candle. He could have moved it closer, but, instead of reading, he listened to what the old women talked about in the bath. At first they joked about how they’d grown so dry that the dirt didn’t stick to them anymore. Then Zinaida said that they had even stopped stinking. When they were young, they’d smelled like pussy, but now it was just dust and mold. Finally, the washing began: they moaned and groaned, pouring water and knocking the tubs around. Suddenly, one of them slipped, fell with a slap, and yawped. Boris Ivanovich leapt up, ready to help. He peered over the curtain. Zinaida and Marfa were pulling Nura off the floor, spilling over with childlike laughter. Boris Ivanovich froze. He’d grown accustomed to their craggy faces, their dark disfigured hands, their stomped-out feet, everything that showed through their ancient faded clothing, but now—Dear Lord!—he was seeing their naked bodies for the first time. He couldn’t take his eyes off them. Their long gray hair flowed over their bumpy spines. Their wrists and feet looked even heavier and more horrible than usual—broken from working the land, gnarled like the roots of old trees. Their fingers were the same color as the earth they’d been digging up for decades. Their bodies were pale, so white that they were blue, like skim milk. Marfa still had her breasts, with their dark animal-like nipples, while the other women’s seemed to have melted away, leaving behind flaccid translucent bags that drooped down to their bellies. Zinaida had long beautiful legs, or what remained of them. All of their butts had been rubbed down to flat spots, with only folds of skin left to mark where the cheeks had once been full. “I’m telling you, Nura, I can’t pick up heavy things anymore. Whenever I try, my uterus starts falling out,” Marfa said provocatively, with a hint of pride. Boris Ivanovich saw that there was a gray sac dangling between her legs like a tobacco pouch. He cringed, but couldn’t turn away from these three Harpy Graces. Marfa squatted and nimbly pushed the sac back into her hairless, crinkled lump, into the depths of what had once been a woman’s body. Boris Ivanovich was not ignorant—he’d graduated from art school and had the genes of a master engraver. In his adolescence, he’d studied Doré’s illustrations for the Divine Comedy, keenly interested in the female body. These contorted creatures stirring two metres before him were the living remains of those bodies. It took an effort of imagination to see any vestiges of woman in their twisted bones and hanging flesh. Old age has no gender, Boris Ivanovich thought, growing terrified. What about me? Will this happen to my body? I don’t want that—I’d rather go out on my own terms than be nullified! Suddenly, there was a burst of laughter. The old women had caught him staring. “Oh! Your lodger’s peeking at the girls, Nurka!” “Let’s beat him with a birch broom so he doesn’t get any ideas!” Nura squealed. “With the stinging nettles! We used to beat the boys who peeked with stinging nettles!” “Come on, you hags. Like I need you! I was just trying to help whoever fell down, and you’ve gotten all excited!” With that, he hid behind the curtain. Afterward, he spent several days sketching the Bath of the White Swans, which was what he called this scene, on the remaining wallpaper. He was able to draw about twenty versions before he ran out of paper. Just as Boris began to get bored, Nikolai Mikhailovich returned with his son, Kolya, to check on the house and take the reserve stores back to Moscow. The winter route was arduous: unable to use the frozen waterway, they had to take the train, the bus, and then travel six more kilometres through the forest on a tractor. Nikolai Mikhailovich brought a large amount of money from Ilya, more than Boris Ivanovich had expected, as well as a letter from his wife. They went to the neighboring village, to the store. The shopkeeper, Verka, who had a deep respect for Nikolai Mikhailovich, pulled the forbidden vodka out from under the counter. Nikolai Mikhailovich had brought two bottles from Moscow, but Boris Ivanovich did not want to miss an opportunity to spend some of his new pile of cash. He had avoided the store, fearing the locals. They fit the store’s entire shabby stock into two backpacks—a bounty of cookies, sticky hard candies without wrappers, oil, barley, a packet of dried peas, briquettes of cherry kisel, blocks of processed cheese, and two packets of salt. Boris Ivanovich kept scanning the shelves for real food. Verka eyed him to see if he was looking for more than groceries. To her dismay, his hungry eyes sought out goods and not her, the beauty. Straightening his back under the weight of his bag, Nikolai Mikhailovich shook his shoulders to better distribute the weight of their purchases, which made the bottles give out a pretty clink. “Are you staying for a while? Come visit us!” Verka propped her round cheek on her beet-red fist. “No, Vera, thank you. I don’t think I’ll be coming back. I’m only here for a day. I haven’t even started warming the house—I just chopped some wood. We’ll spend the night at Svistunikha’s and then head back.” “Frances, where did you ever find such similar others?”Buy the print » “Well, you should at least tell your friend to come see us.” Verka giggled. “We’re bored, us girls. He’s been living here for so long, but he hasn’t made any friends at all.” It turned out that the country telegraph had been functioning all along: Muratov’s presence was known for villages around. “We’re leaving tomorrow. You can get to know each other when we come back in the spring,” Nikolai Mikhailovich said. In anticipation of the men’s return to Danilovy Gorki, Nura had baked potato pies and then retreated behind the stove. Out of politeness, Zinaida and Marfa weren’t around. “Maybe we should invite them over,” Boris Ivanovich said, having finally decided to leave this fantastical sanctuary where he’d stayed too long. “No, they won’t come today. They’re well-mannered countrywomen—they would never come on the first day I’m back. I don’t know why—probably to stay out of the way, or so that they won’t seem like they’re asking for gifts. They were raised well, not like the women today. Verka the shopkeeper steals and parties. She’s Zinaida’s niece, which means she is supposed to come visit her and bring her presents, but she just doesn’t want to. Zinaida’s son has been in prison for the past two years. His wife is a drunk. The grandson drowned last summer, and now all she has left is that slow-witted girl.” Nikolai Mikhailovich gestured dismissively. “But what do you need our country dramas for, Ivanovich?” Kolya came in, his arms full of provisions from the cellar. “Everything’s fine, Dad, nothing froze. The potatoes are in good shape, only I don’t think we’ll be able to get them to the station in such cold weather—they’ll freeze on the way. I would take the cucumbers and mushrooms, but I wouldn’t touch the potatoes.” The three of them were having a good time being men among men, savoring the pies and other country treats. To celebrate their reunion, they peeled the potatoes and ate them with oil, but they didn’t open the canned goods, deciding to leave them for the old women’s Christmas feast. Their Nativity fast had just begun, but, really, the women fasted all year round, with the occasional chicken as their sole reprieve. Around ten that night, there was a knock at the door. Nikolai Mikhailovich flew to his feet, shoved Boris’s plate and glass into his hands, and pushed him behind the stove, where Nura was sleeping. The man at the door was a police officer, Nikolai Svistunov, a distant relative. People in those parts had stopped paying much attention to family ties, because it was half Svistunovs and half Erofeevs for three villages around. Half of the men were named Nikolai. Svistunov threw off his hat and unbuttoned his police coat. Without saying a word, Nikolai Mikhailovich got a clean glass and filled it more than halfway. “I came up to see you because I noticed you’re not heating your home. There’s no light on in there,” Svistunov said. “You have to burn wood for three days to heat the house. We just came up here to take a look at our property and pick up some pickles and mushrooms from our cellar. We’re going to spend the night here at Nura’s and then go back to the city.” There was no road back from Danilovy Gorki, not even a ski run. The only path was the trail that Nikolai and Boris had cleared, which was how the cop had got to the house. Fresh snow had already covered their tracks. “It’s more than an hour’s walk back,” Svistunov said. Wolves had been spotted in Troitsky that week, and he didn’t want to run into any. So he didn’t spend too much time at the old woman’s house: he had gone there on his own initiative, checked everyone’s documents, verified that they were all people he knew and that there were no strangers around. However, just for propriety’s sake, he asked, “Nikolai Mikhailovich, have you seen any strangers around here?” “Strangers?” the artist asked. “No, no strangers, only our own.” And so Svistunov stomped back down the narrow forest trail, running into neither stranger nor wolf. Boris Ivanovich came out from behind the stove, where Nura was still sleeping. The men finished a second bottle of vodka and then had some tea. Boris cleared the table, wiped it off, and placed three stacks of his drawings on it. In one, the old women were talking at the table; the second one had still-lifes with potatoes and pickles alongside nameless objects of unknown utility—some kind of little tongs, wooden pincers, miniature shovels, clay knickknacks that were either for drinking or simply toys; the third stack, the largest, had the naked old women, the joints of their legs, their leathery pouches and sacs, their folds and creases. The drawings weren’t of an Inferno. The women were grinning and chortling. Nikolai Mikhailovich looked at the drawings for a long time, grumbling and sniffling, before finally saying, “Boris, I didn’t even know what a good draftsman you are. You can’t stay here. I don’t know how you’re planning to survive, but I’m taking these pictures back to Moscow. I’ll keep them safe for you until you get back.” He smiled. “If I can stay safe myself.” The next day, they parted ways. Nikolai Mikhailovich and his son left for Moscow and Boris Ivanovich for Vologda. Boris Ivanovich evaded arrest for four years. He got used to the idea that he’d eventually be caught, and so he lived recklessly, gambling with his life. He began in the Vologda region; then for three months he stayed in Tver, at the fidgety, full-throated Anastasia’s house; then, having grown completely brazen, he moved closer to Moscow and took up residence at the dacha of a distant relative. It occurred to him that perhaps no one was even looking for him. His friend Ilya helped him a great deal. He preserved his entire collection, with the exception of the pieces that went abroad. Everything on the other side was going swimmingly. At the end of 1976, he had a show in Cologne, called “Russian Nature Laid Bare.” The hideous old women frolicked in their frames. They were having a good time. This was when they finally caught him, four years after his disappearance. Boris Ivanovich got off with two years and an absurd charge: pornography! It wasn’t the anti-Soviet bologna that got him, or the mausoleum made of bologna—not even the terrible portrait, made out of sausage, of the leader holding a cut-off piece of his own ear on the tines of a fork. It was pornography! After doing two years in a camp in Arkhangelsk, he emigrated to Europe with his new wife, Raika, a little Jewish woman, slippery and solid as a rock, something like Anastasia. They were living happily in Europe, until recently. The beautiful Natasha didn’t waste much time, either. While Boris was in hiding, she found herself a completely normal engineer, with whom she had a daughter of that same breed that Boris Ivanovich had once so admired. Maria Nikolaevna watched over her granddaughter and cooked their meagre meals. The new son-in-law was all right, a decent man, but had nothing on Boris Ivanovich. All the old women in Danilovy Gorki died long ago. Everything is fine. ♦ (Translated, from the Russian, by Bela Shayevich.) 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Caperton’s stepmother, Stell, called. “Your father,” Stell said. “Larry?” Caperton said. “He’s dying. You can say Dad.” “He’s done deathbed before.” “It’s different,” Stell said. “The doctors agree now. And your father, well, no grand speeches about not going gentle, for one thing. For another, he looks out of it, pushed down. He shops online. He watches TV. I think you should be here.” “Command performance?” “Don’t be a crumbum.” Caperton took the short flight from O’Hare to Newark on one of the new boutique lines. Shortbread, cappuccinos, and sea-salted nuts in great jars sated travellers, gratis, at the gate. The in-flight magazine resembled an avant-garde culture journal Caperton once read with fervor. The cover depicted the airline’s female pilots as cockpit kittens with tapered blazers and tilted caps. It was blunted wit, but startling for a commercial carrier. Caperton took note. Among other things, he consulted for a living. That morning, he’d been in meetings about a redo for a small chunk of lakefront. They’d discussed the placement of a Dutch-designed information kiosk; one of the city-council guys kept calling it “the koisk.” “The koisk should be closer to the embankment,” the guy, a boy, bony in his dark suit, said. “We can work on that,” a rival consultant Caperton had not known would be present said. “The main thing is we’re trying to tell a story here. A lakefront narrative.” Were they supposed to make bids in the room together? “My opinions are vaguely aligned with that,” Caperton said. “But what color will the koisk be?” Caperton felt the surge of a strange desire to shelter this apprentice politician from future displays of idiocy, as you might a defective son, though Caperton had no children. He liked kids, just not what they represented. He wasn’t exactly sure what that meant, but it sounded significant, even if Daphne had finally left him over it, had a baby by herself with some Princeton-rower sperm. Aloft in coach, Caperton found himself squeezed up against the trunk of a human sequoia. The man’s white T-shirt stretched to near-transparency over his twitch-prone pecs. His hair shone aerosol gold. His cheek pulsed with each chew of a gum wad he occasionally spat into his palm and sculpted. He winked at Caperton, pressed the pink bolus flat, and slit a crude face in it with his thumbnail. “I’m doing voodoo on the pilot.” “A good time for it,” Caperton said. “Don’t be scared. The plane flies itself. I’ll cure him before we land.” “I’d appreciate that.” “What brings you up into the sky today?” “A personal matter.” “Fuck, I should hope so. Can you imagine wasting a minute of your life on something that wasn’t personal? Something that didn’t mean anything to you? And, I mean, especially if you’re helping other people. Like a mission of mercy. That should always be personal. Otherwise you’re just doing it for the likes. What’s your line of work?” “It’s tricky,” Caperton said. “It’s kind of conceptual marketing, kind of design. I’m a free-range cultural consultant. But my passion is public space.” “Wow. Do you have all that bullshit on one business card?” The man’s enormous biceps jumped. “Sorry,” he said. “That comment was a little aggro of me. The juice does that sometimes.” “The juice?” “I don’t hide it. In my field, I don’t have to. We’re entertainers.” “What’s your field?” Caperton asked. “Dude, I’m a pro wrestler. What the fuck else would I be?” “A bodybuilder?” “Jesus, no! Those guys are pathetic narcissists. They were all abused by their fathers. Every one of them. Don’t you know me? I’m the Rough Beast of Bethlehem. I wrestle on the Internet. You don’t watch, I take it?” “No,” Caperton said. “You think it’s stupid.” “Not at all.” “You think that, now that we’re post-kayfabe, it’s ultra-moronic, right?” “Post-kayfabe?” “Kayfabe was the code we followed. Don’t break character. Pretend it’s not staged. Now we wink at the audience and they wink back.” “Oh, when did that go into effect?” Caperton said. The Rough Beast snorted. “You don’t get it at all, buddy. It’s not about wrestling. It’s about stories. We’re storytellers.” Caperton studied him. “Somebody at my job just said that.” “It’s true! You have to be able to tell the story to get people on board for anything. A soft drink, a suck sesh, elective surgery, gardening, even your thing—public space? I prefer private space, but that’s cool. Anyway, nobody cares about anything if there isn’t a story attached. Ask the team that wrote the Bible. Ask Vincent Allan Poe.” “But doesn’t it seem kind of creepy?” Caperton said. “All of us just going around calling ourselves storytellers?” The Rough Beast shrugged. “Well, you can be negative. That’s the easy way out.” Caperton thought it might be the hard way out. The Beast slipped his gum into his mouth. “Gardening?” Caperton said, after a moment, but by then the Beast had his earbuds in. Stell met Caperton in front of his childhood house, in Nearmont. She leaned against the doorway the way his mother once did. They were not quite the same type, but ballpark, as his father would say. Larry preferred tall, semi-controlling women with light, wavy hair. Stell preferred to smoke pot, laugh, cook, yell at Larry, read good novels, and watch her shows. She’d proved a perfect stepmother, and she and Caperton flourished in their family roles, except for the deal with the refrigerator—or, rather, Stell’s deal with Caperton rummaging freely in the refrigerator. “Deal” was weak wording for it. “Nearly unassuageable rage” seemed more accurate. Stell just thought it would be better if Caperton waited outside the kitchen area. She’d be more than happy to get him whatever he wanted. It would just be better, it really would, if he waited over there at the edge or even beyond the edge of the kitchen area. Caperton harbored a secret ancestral claim to what his forebears had known as the icebox. There had been only so much depredation and madness an American child could endure in the past century. That’s why the government had invented the after-school snack. But he supposed he’d evolved. This was Stell’s house now, and, whatever her idiosyncrasies about the accessibility of chilled provisions, she’d kept his father’s energy up for years, saved him from a fatal spiral when Caperton’s mother died, even, or especially, if she’d been his mistress at the time. For his part, Caperton’s father called Stell the Bossman. Whenever she left the room he would twinkle his snow-blue eyes at Caperton and, his throat choked with affection, say, “What a goddam cunt, huh?” Larry had been married three times, cancered twice. Now the liver, as he put it, was negotiating a severance package. Larry had spent decades on the road, and Caperton used to picture a bawdy shadow life for his father, whiskey sours at a sleek, cushioned bar, a woman with his tie in her teeth. These were bitter visions, but he knew, guiltily, that the anger wasn’t really for his mother’s sake. He just didn’t understand why the man seemed so antsy at home, as though he couldn’t enjoy even a few moments of family life, drinking hot cocoa and overpraising young Caperton’s tediously improvised puppet shows or the lumpy space soldiers he pinched without talent from bright clay. Why were there so few trips to the toy store, or the zoo, or the toy store at the zoo, or, better yet, the snack stand beside the toy store at the zoo? “First World problems,” Daphne once told him. “That’s why they’re so painful.” Caperton had wanted to be, with his father, a team. But Larry had a team, his work buddies, gruff chums whose cruel whinnies carried through the house those Sundays they came to watch football or smoke cigars on the patio. Like Larry, these hard cases were not gangsters but grade-school-textbook salesmen. Larry worked his regions year-round, his returns heralded by the appearance of the exquisite red-and-gold Jade Dragon takeout cartons. Every business trip ended with egg rolls and spareribs and enough monosodium glutamate to goon them all into an animate diorama of menu item No. 14: Happy Family. His father would debrief them, long, duck-sauced fingers curled around a frosted stein. He’d sing of the specialty foods of the nation—the Cincinnati chilies, avocado-and-sprout sandwiches, and spice-rubbed hams of the culinary mosaic—or describe the historic hotels he’d slept in, name the ones with the tastiest pillow mints, the fluffiest towels, the most impressive water pressure. Caperton had found receipts in his father’s overcoat, though, and they all said Howard Johnson. Larry hardly mentioned the people he’d seen or what he and the other salesmen had done, unless they’d scored big on a sale. Many schools, he explained, still taught from textbooks that conjectured a moon shot. Once, he said, he told a school board in Delaware that he’d be delighted to inform Commander Neil Armstrong himself what passed for scientific knowledge in their district. Caperton and his mother whooped, and Larry grinned into his stein. A triumph for Enlightenment values, plus commission. After Caperton’s mother died, his father retired and built birdhouses for a while. He meant well, but to a grown Caperton these designs were rather Cabrini-Green-ish, huge and institutional, as though Larry meant to warehouse the local jays and sparrows in balsa-wood towers of utter marginalization. It troubled Caperton to the point that he considered talking to his father about it, but then construction halted. Crises of the body beckoned. Lung inflammations, nano-strokes, mystery cysts, myeloma scares. Caperton raced home for it all. But Larry couldn’t deliver, until, apparently, now. Caperton kissed Stell and followed her into the house, past the foyer bench and ancient wall hooks. He saw the mauve sofa where he and his father watched movies while his mother died upstairs—Westerns and sports sagas, mostly. Larry loved the one about the ancient, pretty baseball player who steps out of some Hooverville limbo to lead his club in a pennant race. Bad fuckers bribe him to tank the big game, but the hero jacks one, as Larry liked to say, into the stadium lights. Sparks shower down. The republic is renewed. “In the book, he strikes out,” Caperton once told his father. “I know. That’s why it’s a stupid book. Why go through all that trouble to make a great story and then give it an ending like that? That takes real bitterness.” Caperton had said nothing, but thought there might be something brave about the bitterness. “Your father’s sleeping now,” Stell said. “Would you like some coffee? Maybe a sandwich?” He noticed a new strain in Stell’s face. Her hands nipped at each other like little animals. Could he stop himself even if he wanted to? “I can make one later,” Caperton said. “I don’t think that’ll work. I can make one now.” “I can make it. I’ll just look around in the fridge.” “I don’t . . . that can’t . . .” “It’s no problem,” Caperton said. “Just let me make you a sandwich now. No big deal.” “Exactly. I can make it, no biggie.” “But you don’t know what’s there.” “I can look.” “No, honey, please don’t do this. It’s hard to see what’s in the fridge. The bulb is out. But I know what’s there. Tell me what you want.” “I want a turkey-pastrami sandwich with capers and spicy pickles and sharp English mustard on a fresh-baked croissant.” “What?” “Stell, just let me look in the fridge. I have a right. I was looking in that fridge when you were just an old hippie in Jersey City.” Stell stared at the carpet. She looked widowed already. Caperton agreed to let her make him a turkey on wheat, which she would store until he was ready. “I just hope there’s room in the fridge,” Stell said. “Hope is what we have,” Caperton said, because he was a crumbum. Caperton stood in his old bedroom, now Stell’s study. Photographs of her family—nieces, cousins, a stern, tanned uncle—covered the bookshelves. Her people were much comelier than the dough-nosed Capertons. He recognized a few of his old textbooks behind the photographs, but most of the library was Stell’s, an odd mix of self-help and hard science. He pulled out one on the human genome and flipped through it, pulled out another called “Narrative Medicine: How Stories Save Lives.” Stell had a master’s in this discipline. She counselled doctors not to be arrogant jerks, to listen to their patients, or clients, or consumers, or whatever doctors called the people they often helped and occasionally killed. She taught patients how to craft their personal tales. It seemed both noble and, perhaps, a lot of bullshit on one card. Now a pain sliced along his upper torso. He’d felt it before, like being cinched in a hot metal belt. Sometimes the pangs brought him to his knees, left him breathless, but they always faded. Caperton wheezed and clung to a bookshelf for a moment. He was stressed, the doctor had said, because he was anxious. Or maybe the other way around. A lakefront, he wished he’d said at the meeting, was a place where you could stroll and enjoy the sunshine and the lake. Wasn’t that enough? Why bring history into it? History was slaughter and slaves. Stories were devices for deluding ourselves and others, like Larry’s pillow mints. Was this pretentious? Caperton had worried about being pretentious since college, when somebody told him he was pretentious. He knew he was just naïve. Why did he continue to struggle for perspective when others had moved on? A secret dunce gene? A genome? Maybe the scary belt that squeezed him was a warning: stop thinking your shallow thoughts. Stay in the story, moron. He pulled a faded red sneaker box from under the bed. Here resided all the junk, the objets d’crap of his years in this room: buttons, paper clips, lozenge tins, cassette tapes, rolling papers, a tiny airport brandy bottle, the watchband from his uncle’s Seiko, guitar picks and toothpicks and a photograph of his mother leaning on the birch tree in the yard. Probably a box in Daphne’s parents’ house brimmed with similar detritus. A rabbit’s-foot key chain, the fur dyed electric blue. A comic-book version of “The Waves.” Desiccated lip balm and a plastic ruby ring. They’d met at an office party not that many years before, traded a few catchphrases from the sitcoms of their youth. That and the sex seemed enough. But then came the dumb baby question. People thought they could work on you. Wear you down. They assumed you didn’t really mean what you said. Caperton found a condom in the shoebox, the wrapper worn and crinkled, the expiration date three or four Presidents ago, a Herbert Walker rubber, a forgotten land mine that required defusing before some innocents got maimed, or had a baby too early, led stunted lives with little chance for either of them or their issue to someday stand in a room and listen to an elected official say “koisk.” Caperton unbent a paper clip and pricked at the wrapper. He noticed something gunked on the tip of the paper clip, like tar or bong resin. How could that shit stay gooey for so long? The universe was an unanswered question. Had Caperton read that? Heard it on public radio? He couldn’t track what spoke through him anymore. He moaned and held the condom up to the window. Daylight poured through the constellation of holes. Stell stuck her head in. “He’s up,” she said. Larry sat in bed with a tablet in his lap. Caperton noticed the device first, then his father’s freckled stick arms and ashy cheeks. “I’m ordering tons of garbage. Stuff for the house. Gadgets. Why not? I should get some congressional shopping medal.” “I’ll make it my life’s work that you get one,” Caperton said. “What is your life’s work, anyway?” “Stell says it’s serious this time.” Larry looked down at the tablet, swiped the screen with a long, chapped finger. “It’s always been serious,” he said. “Since you get born it’s serious. I mean, I have a greater understanding now. Dying is natural. We’re built to do it. We discuss this in my six-months-and-under group.” “Your what?” Buy the print » “It’s online. No pity parties. Death is just a part of the story.” “I thought it was the end of the story.” “Mr. Doom-and-Gloom.” “Jesus, Dad, you’re the one in bed. What do the doctors say?” “Have you met my doctors? They have pimples. Peach fuzz. They’re all virgins.” “How do you know?” “My tumors know.” “O.K.,” Caperton said. “The way you kids say O.K.,” Larry said. “Sounds like it’s not O.K.” “It’s nice to be called a kid.” “I’m indulging you,” Larry said. “Sit down.” Caperton took the rocker near the window. “How long can you be here?” Larry said. “I’ll be back and forth. I’ll be here.” “I realize I was the boy who cried death. I’m sorry to put you out. But I think I need you. Or Stell will need you.” “I’ll be around,” Caperton said. “I’ll be there and back again.” “Guess you’ve seen all of this before.” “In this very room,” Caperton said. “I know,” Larry said. “In this very bed.” The painting above the headboard was new, and Caperton couldn’t quite tell what it depicted, with its fat swirls of white and gray. It was some kind of ship, or the spume of a whale, or a spiral-whipped wave in a storm. Maybe it had been on the wall for a long time, but certainly not when his mother died. Or had it? He’d once been proud of the precision with which he recalled his mother’s final weeks: the order of familial arrivals, their withered utterances, the last four things his mother ate (mashed potatoes, applesauce, cinnamon oatmeal, cherry ice cream, in that order), the exact position of the water pitcher on the walnut table. But now he couldn’t remember if that painting had been there. “You know,” Larry said, “I had this English professor who used to talk about the death of the individual. ‘The death of the individual,’ he’d say. I had no idea if he was for it or against it. But at least now I know what he was talking about.” “I don’t think he was talking about this.” “The hell you say,” Larry said. Back in his room, Caperton checked up on the lakefront. There were no new developments, just as after all these meetings there would be no new development. It was all a joke. Most of his working hours he spent tracking down his paychecks. He composed a text to Daphne, which he still did sometimes, though she never responded, even when he lied and said that Gates Mandela McAdoo was a wonderful name for her child. Now he wrote, “Here with Larry and Stell. Not good.” He erased “Not good” and replaced it with “More soon.” The moment he sent it an e-mail zipped in from the airline, a survey about his flight. He was about to answer the questions when he remembered the purpose of his trip. Still, he’d rather not be rude. “Flight was great,” he replied, “but I’m dealing with some difficult personal matters.” Probably only robots would read the message, but sometimes it was crucial to clear the emotional desk. He lay down on his old bed, a narrow, thin-mattressed cheapo he’d once cherished as a snuggle palace. He closed his eyes and had one of those mini-dreams he sometimes had before falling asleep. His teasers. This one featured the Rough Beast. They trudged through the rubble of a ruined city. Before them rose a bangled tower, a high, corroded structure made of pig iron, tiles, beach glass, and bottle caps. The Rough Beast paused after each step. “Public or private?” he whispered. “Public or private?” Caperton flew at the Beast, bashed him to the ground. “That’s it, baby!” the Beast cried. “Hurt my shit!” Now there were different voices, and Caperton woke. A man who looked familiar but unplaceable stood just outside the open door. “Hello,” he said. “This must seem strange. But don’t be alarmed. Stell told me to rouse you.” Stell brought out tea and joined the man on the sofa in the living room. Caperton sat down on an ottoman. The man had stiff white hair, a velvet black unibrow. He jiggled Stell’s hand in his lap. “It’s such a joy for me to see you again. I wish it were under better circumstances. Do you remember me?” “You’re Burt,” Caperton said. “You used to come over with the other guys.” “That’s right. Last time I saw you, you were yay high.” Burt lifted his boot off the carpet. “Really? That’s very tiny. I must have been a barely viable fetus then.” Burt chuckled, nudged Stell. “Larry said he was a tough cookie. Your father loves you, you know.” “I know.” “Do you?” Burt said. “Maybe you know better.” “Your father’s from a different generation, that’s all. We weren’t allowed to show our emotions.” “I’ve met men your age who overcame that.” “Outliers,” Burt said. “Or possibly fags. I always liked you, you know. Even when you were a little kid and I could tell you were judging us.” “Us?” “The gang.” Burt pulled Stell’s knuckles to his lips. “Hey, pal, my father’s not dead yet.” “Cool it, Omelet,” Burt said. “Stell and I go back. I introduced your father to her. We’re like family. Anyway, I hear you’re a consultant.” “Yes.” “It’s a very worthy path. I retired from the sales department about ten years after your father. Since then, I’ve taken up a new calling.” “What’s that?” “Burt’s a storyteller,” Stell said. “No shit.” “I must admit it’s true,” Burt said. “Every Saturday I go down to the library and tell stories to the children. I’m sure I bore the pants off them, but I get a thrill.” “Tell me a story.” “Well, I don’t know if this is really a good time for—” “Just tell me a story.” Burt told Caperton a story. It had a boy in it, an eagle feather, a shiny blue turtle. There was an ogre in a cave. Rivers were crossed on flimsy ropes, wise witches sought for counsel, bandits hunted and rehabilitated. The blue turtle led the boy to a princess. The princess fought the ogre and saved the boy. Caperton soaked up every word and couldn’t take his eyes off Burt’s brow, which lifted at the close of the tale. “Bravo,” Stell said. “Pulled that one out of my butt,” Burt said. “That’s why you’re a genius,” Stell said. “Am I right?” Caperton shrugged. “I don’t know. Seemed a little cheesy to me.” “Helps if you’re five,” Burt said. “Not some snide turd turning forty.” Caperton stood. “You’re right, Burt. What can I say? I’m feeling peckish.” Stell shrieked. “Please, don’t go in there! What do you want? I’ll get your sandwich! Or do you want something else? Just tell me what you want! Let me make it for you!” Caperton opened the fridge and in the darkness saw what he wanted. What he could make. He scooped up a bag of bread, a tomato, a hard-boiled egg. Stell charged him, crumpled against his hip, wrapped up his knees. The egg flew away. Caperton slit the bread bag open with his thumbnail, balled up a soft slice of seven-grain and shoved it in his mouth. He bit into the tomato and seeds ran down his wrists, pulp splotched the wall. “Stop!” Stell said. “What are you doing?” “I’m having an after-school snack,” Caperton snarled, and fisted up another bread ball, licked the tomato’s bright wound. “You’re sick!” Stell said, and from her knees tried to shove him clear of the kitchen. Caperton bent over her, whispered, “Thanks for the medical narrative.” He ripped open his shirt and crushed the mutilated tomato against his chest. Juice glistened in dark burls of hair. He thought that maybe he was about to make a serious declaration, or even try to laugh the whole thing off, when he felt a twinge, a test cinch for another spell of nervous woe. The Belt of Intermittent Sorrow, which he somehow now named the moment it went tight, squeezed him to the kitchen floor. That night he texted Daphne: Can’t sleep in this bed. It’s crazy here. Creepy. Like a bad play. Or a bad production of a good play. How is little Gates? I’m sure you’re a wonderful mother. Maybe if mine hadn’t died I would have felt differently. Who knows? You know I’ll always love you. More later. Talk soon. Minutes later Caperton heard his text tone: shod hooves on cobblestones. Let me introduce myself. My name is Miles and I’m the nanny. I was a Division II nose tackle not very long ago. If you keep texting Daphne I’ll come to your house and feed you your phone. Daphne does not wish to receive messages from you, now or in the future. Good day. Good day? Caperton shivered in his shoddy childhood cot. Let the sobbing begin, he texted to himself, and sank into hard slumber beneath his dank duvet. The next morning Caperton stood beside a taxi in the driveway. Stell gathered him in for a hug. “I’m sorry,” Caperton said, fingering the pierced condom in his pocket. “Stop saying that. Just go see a doctor. And a therapist.” “I will. I’ll be back for the weekend. I’ll be back and forth.” “I know,” Stell said. Burt stood on the lawn in cop shades. Was he protecting Stell from her hair-trigger stepson? Standing vigil for his dying amigo? Just before coming outside, Caperton had checked on his father. Larry had maybe taken a little bit of a bad turn. He looked pretty damn sick. “Work beckons, huh?” Larry nodded at Caperton’s coat. “Afraid so. Be here Saturday.” Caperton took his father’s hand. “Listen,” Caperton said. “I realize I’ve been an idiot, Dad. All my pointless rage. I’ve wasted so much time trying to get a certain feeling back. But it’s a child’s feeling, and I can’t have it anymore. But I love you. I really do. Know that. And let’s not hold back. With the time we have, let’s say everything to each other. That’s all I want.” Something like a ship’s light, far away, began to glow, stately and forlorn, in Larry’s eyes. He gripped his son’s hand harder. “I know you’re strapped for time,” Larry said, his voice raspier in just the past day. “But there’s this new show on cable, you really should watch it. It’s amazing.” “A show?” “No, really,” Larry said, strained upward, and coughed in Caperton’s ear the name of the showrunner, and how this fellow had also created another hit series. “The character arcs are groundbreaking,” Larry said. “It’s a golden age of cable television.” “Sounds great.” “I’d wait to watch it with you,” Larry said. “But, well, you know…” “I’ll be back,” Caperton said. “And forth.” Larry said. “I’m glad. I need you, son.” Caperton was not surprised to see the Rough Beast in the terminal. The Internet wrestler sipped from a demitasse at a granite countertop near the gate. Caperton thought to approach him, but the quest for symmetry seemed a mistake. Besides, the Beast wouldn’t remember a snide turd like him. Caperton had two seats to himself on the plane. He wished he could relish the boon, but it made him anxious. A free seat meant that anybody could take it at any time, lumber up from the back rows looking for relief—a fatty, a talker, the ghost of his mother, Death itself, Burt. Caperton took the aisle seat, the better to defend the window and, about twenty minutes into the flight, heard a loud grunt, felt a hard pinch on his earlobe. “How are you, man?” the Beast said. “What’s the story?” A pill from Stell had introduced Caperton to a new flippancy. “The story, Mr. Beast? It’s ongoing. Arcing hard. It’s an arcing savage, an astonishment machine.” “Booyah! And how’s your personal matter?” “Everything’s going to be O.K., my man, within the context of nothing ever being O.K.” “Brother has been on a philosophical fact-finding mission, come back with the news.” The Beast proffered five, belly-high. “Please,” a flight attendant said, approaching from business. “No congregating.” “Nobody’s congregating,” the Beast said. “We can’t allow congregating for security reasons.” “Just shooting the breeze here, sweetness. No box cutters.” “Sir.” “Maybe you’re too young for that reference.” “Please sit down.” “O.K., fine,” the Beast said, and walked back to his row. When the plane landed, Caperton lifted his half-unzipped bag from under the seat and noticed a sandwich tucked under some socks. Pastrami and capers. On a croissant. Caperton chewed and waited for the plane to reach the gate. It would be an odd time now. Larry, the Fates willing, might hold on for a while. They would have a chance to grow close again. Caperton knew he would not run from this. Even if his father doubted him, he knew he would be there when it counted. He checked his phone and saw the messages stack up in comforting fashion. Life might be looking down, but at least coms were up. It took just the briefest skim of his messages for all comfort to vanish. Now he could only ponder how strange it was that you could move at these outrageous speeds through the air and know everything known and still control nothing. For example, during this one quick flight his father had died, and the bony young councilman, the Prince of Koisks, had kicked him off the project. Also, there was an e-mail from the airline he’d just flown explaining how much they respected his time and offering consolation for his current difficulties. Worse than robots, really. Caperton called the only person he could call. Daphne answered and told him to hold on. Another voice came on the line. “This is Miles.” “Jesus, I thought she made you up.” “No, I’m very much an entity of your dimension. Somebody who could find you and stomp on your urethra in what we foolishly call real time. Did you not receive the text message?” “I did,” Caperton said. “But you thought calling was O.K.?” “Did you say you were the nanny?” “Goodbye, Mr.— ” “No, Miles, please don’t hang up. Just stay on the line for a minute. For sixty seconds. That’s all. I’m having a bad moment. I don’t need Daphne. You’ll do fine. My father just died. Please just . . . I just . . .” “Why don’t you emulate your old man,” Miles said, hung up. Caperton groaned, shook, curled up in his seats, and watched people stand and grope at the overhead bins. He heard the Beast barrel through the throng behind him. Here he loomed again. “Caught the end of your call.” “Yeah,” Caperton said. “We’ll be here awhile, waiting for all these people. Shove over.” Caperton slid toward the window and the Rough Beast sat down. He patted Caperton’s knee. “Terrible about your pops. Mine went easy. Keeled over on his city snowplow up in Rochester. But that doesn’t make it any better for you.” “No.” “It’s O.K. You’re with me now. Everything will be O.K. Cry for your father. What man doesn’t cry for his father? Let it out.” Caperton cooled his forehead on the window. The Beast stroked his back. “They say it’s a cycle, but there is no cycle. You get jerked in and reamed out. That’s all.” Caperton could not cry again. Also, he thought he might be onto a new phase. Lumped nullity. Drool drooped from his lip. He looked up and saw that the plane was empty. “I’m sorry,” one of the flight attendants said. “But it’s time to leave.” “We’ll leave soon,” the Beast said. “When it’s time.” “But it’s time now.” “No, it’s not!” the Rough Beast shouted, cocked his hand for a karate chop. “This man’s in the middle of a fucking hinge moment! I’ll waste you all!” One of the flight attendants called security on her walkie-talkie. The others dashed for the door. Caperton, who now felt a wider and more fiery belt of perhaps increasingly frequent sorrow begin to singe him, slid to his knees and crushed his face into the seat back. The underside of the locked and upright tray, cool and vaguely pebbled, was heaven on his skin.

Wearily, moving his feet because he had nothing else to do, Christopher went on down the road, hating the trees that moved slowly against his progress, hating the dust beneath his feet, hating the sky, hating this road, all roads, everywhere. He had been walking since morning, and all day the day before that, and the day before that, and days before that, back into the numberless line of walking days that dissolved, seemingly years ago, into the place he had left, once, before he started walking. This morning he had been walking past fields, and now he was walking past trees that mounted heavily to the road, and leaned across, bending their great old bodies toward him; Christopher had come into the forest at a crossroads, turning onto the forest road as though he had a choice, looking back once to see the other road, the one he had not chosen, going peacefully on through fields, in and out of towns, perhaps even coming to an end somewhere beyond Christopher’s sight. The cat had joined him shortly after he entered the forest, emerging from between the trees in a quick, shadowy movement that surprised Christopher at first and then, oddly, comforted him, and the cat had stayed beside him, moving closer to Christopher as the trees pressed insistently closer to them both, trotting along in the casual acceptance of human company that cats exhibit when they are frightened. Christopher, when he stopped once to rest, sitting on a large stone at the edge of the road, had rubbed the cat’s ears and pulled the cat’s tail affectionately, and had said, “Where we going, fellow? Any ideas?,” and the cat had closed his eyes meaningfully and opened them again. “Haven’t seen a house since we came into these trees,” Christopher remarked once, later, to the cat; squinting up at the sky, he had added, “Going to be dark before long.” He glanced apprehensively at the trees so close to him, irritated by the sound of his own voice in the silence, as though the trees were listening to him and, listening, had nodded solemnly to one another. “Don’t worry,” Christopher said to the cat. “Road’s got to go somewhere.” It was not much later—an hour before dark, probably—that Christopher and the cat paused, surprised, at a turn in the road, because a house was ahead. A neat stone fence ran down to the road, smoke came naturally from the chimneys, the doors and windows were not nailed shut, nor were the steps broken or the hinges sagging. It was a comfortable-looking, settled old house, made of stone like its fence, easily found in the pathless forest because it lay correctly, compactly, at the end of the road, which was not a road at all, of course, but merely a way to the house. Christopher thought briefly of the other way, long before, that he had not followed, and then moved forward, the cat at his heels, to the front door of the house. The sound of a river came from among the trees that pressed closely against the sides of the house; the river knew a way out of the forest, because it moved along sweetly and clearly, over clean stones and, unafraid, among the dark trees. Christopher approached the house as he would any house, farmhouse, suburban home, or city apartment, and knocked politely and with pleasure on the warm front door. “Come in, then,” a woman said as she opened it, and Christopher stepped inside, followed closely by the cat. The woman stood back and looked for a minute at Christopher, her eyes searching and wide; he looked back at her and saw that she was young, not so young as he would have liked, but too young, seemingly, to be living in the heart of a forest. “I’ve been here for a long time, though,” she said, as though she read his thoughts. Out of this dark hallway, he thought, she might look older; her hair curled a little around her face, and her eyes were far too wide for the rest of her, as if she were constantly straining to see in the gloom of the forest. She wore a long green dress that was gathered at her waist by a belt made of what he subsequently saw was grass woven into a rope; she was barefoot. While he stood uneasily just inside the door, looking at her as she looked at him, the cat went round the hall, stopping curiously at corners and before closed doors, glancing up, once, into the unlighted heights of the stairway that rose from the far end of the hall. “He smells another cat,” she said. “We have one.” “Phyllis,” a voice called from the back of the house, and the woman smiled quickly, nervously, at Christopher and said, “Come along, please. I shouldn’t keep you waiting.” He followed her to the door at the back of the hall, next to the stairway, and was grateful for the light that greeted them when she opened it. It led directly into a great warm kitchen, glowing with an open fire on its hearth, and well lit, against the late-afternoon dimness of the forest, by three kerosene lamps set on table and shelves. A second woman stood by the stove, watching the pots that steamed and smelled maddeningly of onions and herbs; Christopher closed his eyes, like the cat, against the unbelievable beauty of warmth, light, and the smell of onions. “Well,” the woman at the stove said with finality, turning to look at Christopher. She studied him carefully, as the other woman had done, and then turned her eyes to a bare whitewashed area, high on the kitchen wall, where lines and crosses indicated a rough measuring system. “Another day,” she said. “What’s your name?” the first woman asked Christopher, and he said “Christopher” without effort and then, “What’s yours?” “Phyllis,” the young woman said. “What’s your cat’s name?” “I don’t know,” Christopher said. He smiled a little. “It’s not even my cat,” he went on, his voice gathering strength from the smell of the onions. “He just followed me here.” “We’ll have to name him something,” Phyllis said. When she spoke she looked away from Christopher, turning her overlarge eyes on him again only when she stopped speaking. “Our cat’s named Grimalkin.” “Grimalkin,” Christopher said. “Her name,” Phyllis said, gesturing toward the cook with her head. “Her name’s Aunt Cissy.” “Circe,” the older woman said doggedly to the stove. “Circe I was born and Circe I will have for my name till I die.” Although she seemed, from the way she stood and the way she kept her voice to a single note, to be much older than Phyllis, actually, when Christopher saw her face clearly in the light of the lamps she was as vigorous and clear-eyed as Phyllis, and the strength in her arms when she lifted the great iron pot easily off the stove and carried it to the stone table in the center of the kitchen surprised Christopher. The cat, who had followed Christopher and Phyllis into the kitchen, leaped noiselessly onto the bench beside the table, and then onto the table; Phyllis looked warily at Christopher for a minute before she pushed the cat gently to drive him off the table. “We’ll have to find a name for your cat,” she said apologetically as the cat leaped down without taking offense. “Kitty,” Christopher said helplessly. “I guess I always call cats kitty.” Phyllis shook her head. She was about to speak when Aunt Cissy stopped her with a glance, and Phyllis moved quickly to an iron chest in the corner of the kitchen, from which she took a cloth to spread on the table, and heavy stone plates and mugs, which she set on the table in four places. Christopher sat down on the bench, with his back to the table, to indicate clearly that he had no intention of presuming that he was sitting at the table but was only on the bench because he was tired, that he would not swing around to the table until invited warmly and specifically to do so. “Are we almost ready, then?” Aunt Cissy said. She swept her eyes across the table, adjusted a fork, and stood back, her glance never for a minute resting on Christopher. Then she moved over to the wall beside the door, where she stood, quiet and erect, and Phyllis went to stand beside her. Christopher, turning his head to look at them, had to turn again as footsteps approached from the hall, and, after a minute’s interminable pause, the door opened. The two women stayed respectfully by the far wall, and Christopher stood up without knowing why, except that it was his host who was entering. “We’ve been at it for the better part of an hour and still no solution.”Buy the print » This was a man toward the end of middle age; although he held his shoulders stiffly back, they looked as if they would sag without a constant effort. His face was lined and tired, and his mouth, like his shoulders, appeared to be falling downward into resignation. He was dressed, as the women were, in a long green robe tied at the waist, and he, too, was barefoot. As he stood in the doorway, with the darkness of the hall behind him, his white head shone softly and his eyes, bright and curious, regarded Christopher for a long minute before they turned, as the older woman’s had done, to the crude measuring system on the upper wall. “We are honored to have you here,” he said at last to Christopher; his voice was resonant, like the sound of the wind in the trees. Without speaking again, he took his seat at the head of the stone table and gestured to Christopher to take the place on his right. Phyllis came away from her post by the door and slipped into the place across from Christopher, and Aunt Cissy served them all from the iron pot before taking her own place at the foot of the table. Christopher stared down at the plate before him, and the rich smell of the onions and meat met him, so that he closed his eyes again for a minute before starting to eat. When he lifted his head he could see, over Phyllis’s head, the dark window; the trees pressed so close against it that their branches were bent against the glass, a tangled crowd of leaves and branches looking in. “What will we call you?” the old man asked Christopher at last. “I’m Christopher,” Christopher said, looking only at his plate or up at the window. “And have you come far?” the old man said. “Very far.” Christopher smiled. “I suppose it seems farther than it really is,” he explained. “I am named Oakes,” the old man said. Christopher gathered himself together with an effort. Ever since entering this strange house he had been bewildered, as though drunk from the endless trees he had come through, and uneasy at coming from darkness and the watching forest into a house where he sat down without introductions at his host’s table. Swallowing, Christopher turned to look at Mr. Oakes, and said, “It’s very kind of you to take me in. If you hadn’t, I guess I’d have been wandering around in the woods all night.” Mr. Oakes bowed his head slightly at Christopher. “I guess I was a little frightened,” Christopher said with a small embarrassed laugh. “All those trees.” “Indeed yes,” Mr. Oakes said placidly. “All those trees.” Christopher wondered if he had shown his gratitude adequately. He wanted very much to say something further, something that might lead to an explicit definition of his privileges: whether he was to stay the night, for instance, or whether he must go out again into the woods in the darkness; whether, if he did stay the night, he might have in the morning another such meal as this dinner. When Aunt Cissy filled his plate a second time, Christopher smiled up at her. “This is certainly wonderful,” he said to her. “I don’t know when I’ve had a meal I enjoyed this much.” Aunt Cissy bowed her head to him as Mr. Oakes had before. “The food comes from the woods, of course,” Mr. Oakes said. “Circe gathers her onions down by the river, but naturally none of that need concern you.” “I suppose not,” Christopher said, feeling that he was not to stay the night. “Tomorrow will be soon enough for you to see the house,” Mr. Oakes added. “I suppose so,” Christopher said, realizing that he was indeed to stay the night. “Tonight,” Mr. Oakes said, his voice deliberately light. “Tonight, I should like to hear about you, and what things you have seen on your journey, and what takes place in the world you have left.” Christopher smiled; knowing that he could stay the night, and could not in charity be dismissed before the morning, he felt relaxed. Aunt Cissy’s good dinner had pleased him, and he was ready enough to talk with his host. “I don’t really know quite how I got here,” he said. “I just took the road into the woods.” “You would have to go through the woods to get here,” his host agreed soberly. “Before that,” Christopher went on, “I passed a lot of farmhouses and a little town—do you know the name of it? I asked a woman there for a meal and she turned me away.” He laughed now, at the memory, with Aunt Cissy’s good dinner finished. “And before that,” he said, “I was studying.” “You are a scholar,” the old man said. “Naturally.” “I don’t know why.” Christopher turned at last to Mr. Oakes and spoke frankly. “I don’t know why,” he repeated. “One day I was there, in college, like everyone else, and then the next day I just left, without any reason except that I did.” He glanced from Mr. Oakes to Phyllis to Aunt Cissy; they were all looking at him with blank expectation. He stopped, and said lamely, “And I guess that’s all that happened before I came here.” “He brought a cat with him,” Phyllis said softly, her eyes down. “A cat?” Mr. Oakes looked politely around the kitchen, saw Christopher’s cat curled up under the stove, and nodded. “One brought a dog,” he said to Aunt Cissy. “Do you remember the dog?” Aunt Cissy nodded, her face unchanging. There was a sound at the door, and Phyllis said without moving, “That is our Grimalkin coming for his supper.” Aunt Cissy rose and went over to the outer door and opened it. A cat, tiger-striped where Christopher’s cat was black, but about the same size, trotted casually into the kitchen, without a glance for Aunt Cissy, went directly for the stove, then saw Christopher’s cat. Christopher’s cat lifted his head lazily, widened his eyes, and stared at Grimalkin. “I think they’re going to fight,” Christopher said nervously, half rising from his seat. “Perhaps I’d better—” But he was too late. Grimalkin lifted his voice in a deadly wail, and Christopher’s cat spat, without stirring from his comfortable bed under the stove; then Grimalkin moved incautiously and was caught off guard by Christopher’s cat. Spitting and screaming, they clung to each other briefly, and then Grimalkin ran crying out the door that Aunt Cissy opened for him. Mr. Oakes sighed. “What is your cat’s name?” he inquired. “I’m terribly sorry,” Christopher said, with a fleeting fear that the irrational cat might have deprived them both of a bed. “Shall I go and find Grimalkin outside?” Mr. Oakes laughed. “He was fairly beaten,” he said, “and has no right to come back.” “Now,” Phyllis said softly, “now we can call your cat Grimalkin. Now we have a name, Grimalkin, and no cat, so we can give the name to your cat.” Christopher slept that night in a stone room at the top of the house; a room reached by the dark staircase leading from the hall. Mr. Oakes carried a candle to the room for him, and Christopher’s cat, now named Grimalkin, left the warm stove to follow Christopher. The room was small and neat, and the bed was a stone bench, which Christopher, investigating after his host had gone, discovered to his amazement was mattressed with leaves, and had for blankets heavy furs that looked like bearskins. “This is quite a forest,” Christopher said to the cat, rubbing a corner of the bearskin between his hands. “And quite a family.” Against the window of Christopher’s room, as against all the windows in the house, was the wall of trees, crushing themselves hard against the glass. “I wonder if that’s why they made this house out of stone?” Christopher asked the cat. “So the trees wouldn’t push it down?” All night long the sound and the feeling of the trees crowding against the house came into Christopher’s dreams, and he turned gratefully in his sleep to the cat purring beside him in the great fur coverings. In the morning, Christopher came down into the kitchen, where Phyllis and Aunt Cissy, in their green robes, were moving about the stove. His cat, who had followed him all the way down the stairs, moved immediately ahead of him in the kitchen to sit under the stove and watch Aunt Cissy expectantly. When Phyllis had set the stone table and Aunt Cissy had laid out the food, they both moved over to the doorway as they had the night before, waiting for Mr. Oakes to come in. When he came, he nodded to Christopher and they sat, as before, Aunt Cissy serving them all. Mr. Oakes did not speak this morning, and when the meal was over he rose, gesturing to Christopher to follow him. They went out into the hall, with its silent closed doors, and Mr. Oakes paused. “You have seen only part of the house, of course,” he said. “Our handmaidens keep to the kitchen unless called to this hall.” “Where do they sleep?” Christopher asked. “In the kitchen?” He was immediately embarrassed by his own question, and smiled awkwardly at Mr. Oakes to say that he did not deserve an answer, but Mr. Oakes shook his head in amusement and put his hand on Christopher’s shoulder. “On the kitchen floor,” he said. And then he turned his head away, but Christopher could see that he was laughing. “Circe,” he said, “sleeps nearer to the door from the hall.” Christopher felt his face growing red and, glad for the darkness of the hall, said quickly, “It’s a very old house, isn’t it?” “Very old,” Mr. Oakes said, as though surprised by the question. “A house was found to be vital, of course.” “Of course,” Christopher said, agreeably. “I know I’m supposed to be giving you some kind of moral guidance, but I just can’t get over how weird an ear looks up close.”Buy the print » “In here,” Mr. Oakes said, opening one of the two great doors on either side of the entrance. “In here are the records kept.” Christopher followed him in, and Mr. Oakes went to a candle that stood in its own wax on a stone table and lit it with the flint that lay beside it. He then raised the candle high, and Christopher saw that the walls were covered with stones, piled up to make loose, irregular shelves. On some of the shelves great, leather-covered books stood, and on other shelves lay stone tablets, and rolls of parchment. “They are of great value,” Mr. Oakes said sadly. “I have never known how to use them, of course.” He walked slowly over and touched one huge volume, and then turned to show Christopher his fingers covered with dust. “It is my sorrow,” he said, “that I cannot use these things of great value.” Christopher, frightened by the books, drew back into the doorway. “At one time,” Mr. Oakes said, shaking his head, “there were many more. Many, many more. I have heard that at one time this room was made large enough to hold the records. I have never known how they came to be destroyed.” Still carrying the candle, he led Christopher out of the room and shut the big door behind them. Across the hall another door faced them. As Mr. Oakes led the way in with the candle, Christopher saw that it was another bedroom, larger than the one in which he had slept, but with the trees pressing as close against it. “This, of course,” Mr. Oakes said, “is where I have been sleeping, to guard the records.” He held the candle high again and Christopher saw a stone bench like his own, with heavy furs lying on it, and above the bed a long and glittering knife resting upon two pegs driven between the stones of the wall. “The keeper of the records,” Mr. Oakes said, and sighed briefly before he smiled at Christopher in the candlelight. “We are like two friends,” he added. “One showing the other his house.” “But—” Christopher began, and Mr. Oakes laughed. “Let me show you my roses,” he said. Christopher followed him helplessly back into the hall, where Mr. Oakes blew out the candle and left it on a shelf by the door, and then out the front door to the tiny cleared patch before the house which was surrounded by the stone wall that ran to the road. Although for a small distance before them the world was clear of trees, it was not very much lighter or more pleasant, with the forest only barely held back by the stone wall, edging as close to it as possible, pushing, as Christopher had felt since the day before, crowding up and embracing the little stone house in horrid possession. “Here are my roses,” Mr. Oakes said, his voice warm. He looked calculatingly beyond at the forest as he spoke, his eyes measuring the distance between the trees and his roses. “I planted them myself,” he said. “I was the first one to clear away even this much of the forest. Because I wished to plant roses in the midst of this wilderness. Even so,” he added, “I had to send Circe for roses from the midst of this beast around us, to set them here in my little clear spot.” He leaned affectionately over the roses, which grew gloriously against the stone of the house, on a vine that rose triumphantly almost to the height of the door. Over him, over the roses, over the house, the trees leaned eagerly. “They need to be tied up against stakes every spring,” Mr. Oakes said. He stepped back a pace and measured with his hand above his head. “A stake—a small tree stripped of its branches will do, and Circe will get it and sharpen it—and the rose vine tied to it as it leans against the house.” Christopher nodded. “Someday the roses will cover the house, I imagine,” he said. “Do you think so?” Mr. Oakes turned eagerly to him. “My roses?” “It looks like it,” Christopher said awkwardly, his fingers touching the first stake, bright against the stones of the house. Mr. Oakes shook his head, smiling. “Remember who planted them,” he said. They went inside again and through the hall into the kitchen, where Aunt Cissy and Phyllis stood against the wall as they entered. Again they sat at the stone table and Aunt Cissy served them, and again Mr. Oakes said nothing while they ate and Phyllis and Aunt Cissy looked down at their plates as always. After the meal was over, Mr. Oakes bowed to Christopher before leaving the room, and while Phyllis and Aunt Cissy cleared the table of plates and cloth Christopher sat on the bench with his cat on his knee. The women seemed to be unusually occupied. Aunt Cissy, at the stove, set down iron pots enough for a dozen meals, and Phyllis, sent to fetch a special utensil from an alcove in the corner of the kitchen, came back to report that it had been mislaid “since the last time” and could not be found, so that Aunt Cissy had to put down her cooking spoon and go herself to search. Phyllis set a great pastry shell on the stone table, and she and Aunt Cissy filled it slowly and lovingly with spoonfuls from one or another pot on the stove, stopping to taste and estimate, questioning each other with their eyes. “What are you making?” Christopher asked finally. “A feast,” Phyllis said, glancing at him quickly and then away. Christopher’s cat watched, purring, until Aunt Cissy disappeared into the kitchen alcove again and came back carrying the trussed carcass of what seemed to Christopher to be a wild pig. She and Phyllis set this on the spit before the great fireplace, and Phyllis sat beside it to turn the spit. Then Christopher’s cat leaped down and ran over to the fireplace to sit beside Phyllis and taste the drops of fat that fell on the great hearth as the spit was turned. “Who is coming to your feast?” Christopher asked, amused. Phyllis looked around at him, and Aunt Cissy half turned from the stove. There was a silence in the kitchen, a silence of no movement and almost no breath, and then, before anyone could speak, the door opened and Mr. Oakes came in. He was carrying the knife from his bedroom, and he held it out for Christopher to see with a shrug of resignation. When Mr. Oakes had seated himself at the table Aunt Cissy disappeared again into the alcove and brought back a grindstone, which she set before Mr. Oakes. Deliberately, with the slow caution of a pleasant action lovingly done, Mr. Oakes set about sharpening the knife. He held the bright blade against the moving stone, turning the edge little by little with infinite delicacy. “You say you’ve come far?” he said over the sound of the knife, and for a minute his eyes left the grindstone to rest on Christopher. “Quite a ways,” Christopher said, watching the grindstone. “I don’t know how far, exactly.” “And you were a scholar?” “Yes,” Christopher said. “A student.” Mr. Oakes looked up from the knife again, to the estimate marked on the wall. “Christopher,” he said softly, as though estimating the name. When the knife was razor sharp he held it up to the light from the fire, studying the blade. Then he looked at Christopher and shook his head humorously. “As sharp as any weapon can be,” he said. Aunt Cissy spoke, unsolicited, for the first time. “Sun’s down,” she said. Mr. Oakes nodded. He looked at Phyllis for a minute, and then at Aunt Cissy. Then, with his sharpened knife in his hand, he walked over and put his free arm around Christopher’s shoulder. “Will you remember about the roses?” he asked. “They must be tied up in the spring if they mean to grow at all.” For a minute his arm stayed warmly around Christopher’s shoulders, and then, carrying his knife, he went over to the back door and waited while Aunt Cissy came to open it for him. As the door was opened, the trees showed for a minute, dark and greedy. Then Aunt Cissy closed the door behind Mr. Oakes. For a minute she leaned her back against it, watching Christopher, and then, standing away from it, she opened it again. Christopher, staring, walked slowly over to the open door, as Aunt Cissy seemed to expect he would, and heard behind him Phyllis’s voice from the hearth. “He’ll be down by the river,” she said softly. “Go far around and come up behind him.” The door shut solidly behind Christopher and he leaned against it, looking with frightened eyes at the trees that reached for him on either side. Then, as he pressed his back in terror against the door, he heard the voice calling from the direction of the river, so clear and ringing through the trees that he hardly knew it as Mr. Oakes’s: “Who is he dares enter these my woods?”

By late afternoon, Owen’s parents were usually having their first cocktails. His mother gave hers some thought, looking upon it as a special treat, while his father served himself “a stiff one” in a more matter-of-fact way, his every movement expressing a conviction that he had a right to this stuff, no matter how disagreeable or lugubrious or romantic it might soon make him. He made a special point of not asking permission as he poured, with a workmanlike concentration on not spilling a drop. Owen’s mother held her drink between the tips of her fingers; his father held his in his fist. Owen could see solemnity descend on his father’s brow with the first sip, while his mother often looked apprehensive about the possible hysteria to come. Owen remembered a Saturday night when his father had air-paddled backward, collapsing into the kitchen trash can and terrifying the family boxer, Gertrude. Gertrude had bitten Owen’s father the first time she saw him drunk and now viewed him with a detachment that was similar to Owen’s. In any event, the cocktails were Owen’s cue to head for the baseball diamond that the three Kershaw boys and their father had built in the pasture across from their house, with the help of any neighborhood kids who’d wanted to pitch in—clearing brush, laying out the baselines and boundaries, forming the pitcher’s mound, or driving in the posts for the backstop. Doug, the eldest Kershaw boy, was already an accomplished player, with a Marty Marion infielder’s mitt and a pair of cleats. Terry, the middle son, was focussed on developing his paper route and would likely be a millionaire by thirty. Ben, the youngest and sweetest, was disabled and mentally handicapped, but he loved baseball above all things; he had a statistician’s capacity for memorizing numbers and had learned to field a ball with one crippled hand and to make a respectable throw with the other. To Owen, Ben’s attributes were nothing remarkable: he had his challenges; Ben had others. It was rare to have full teams, and occasional lone outfielders started at center field and prepared to run. Eventually, Ben was moved off first base and into the outfield. With his short arms, he couldn’t keep his foot on the bag and reach far enough for bad throws. Double plays came along only about three times a summer, and no one wanted to put them at risk. So long as Ben could identify with a renowned player who had played his position—in this case, Hoot Evers—he was happy to occupy it, and physically he did better with flies than with grounders. Owen was happy with his George Kell spot at third base, and he didn’t intend to relinquish it. He was a poor hitter—he was trying to graduate from choking the bat, though he was still not strong enough to hold it at the grip—but his ability to cover stinging grounders close to the foul line was considered compensation for his small production at the plate. He had learned to commit late to the ball’s trajectory—grounders often changed angles, thanks to the field’s irregularities—and he went fairly early when they chose up sides. Chuck Wood went late, despite being the most muscular boy there, as he always swung for the fence in wan hope of a home run and was widely considered a showboater. Ben was a polished bunter and could run like the wind, assuring his team of at least one man on base. He was picked early, sometimes first, but never got to be captain, because in the hand-over-hand-on-the-bat ritual for choosing sides, his hand wouldn’t fit anywhere below the label. In the beginning, Mrs. Kershaw had stuck around to make sure that he was treated fairly, announcing, “If Ben doesn’t play, nobody plays.” But now he belonged, and she restricted her supervision to meeting him as he got off the school bus and casting an authoritarian glance through the other passengers’ windows. After a game, the equipment was stored on the back porch of the Kershaw house, where Terry ran his newspaper operation and often recruited the players to help him fold for the evening delivery. The Kershaws’ small black schipperke dog, Smudge, watched from a corner. Doug put a few drops of neat’s-foot oil in the pocket of his mitt, folded a ball into it, and placed it on the broad shelf that held shin guards, a catcher’s mask, and a cracked Hillerich & Bradsby thirty-four-inch bat that Mr. Kershaw thought could be glued. It had been a mistake to go from oak to maple, he said. Eventually, Mrs. Kershaw would appear, mopping her hands on her apron before making an announcement: “Kershaw dinner. All other players begone.” Owen and the other boys would rush out, with ceremonial doorway collisions, looking up at the sky through the trees: still light enough to play. Owen would walk home, reflecting on the game, his hits, if he’d had any, his errors and fielding accomplishments. His parents dined late and by candlelight, in an atmosphere that was disquieting to Owen and at odds with thoughts about baseball. He eventually gave up on family dinners altogether and fed himself on cold cereal. Sometimes he arrived home in time for an argument, his father booming over his mother’s more penetrating vehemence. There were times when his parents seemed to be entertaining themselves this way, and times when they seemed to draw blood. Owen would flip his glove onto the hall bench and slip upstairs to his room and his growing collection of hubcaps. He’d still never been caught. He had once been on probation with the Kershaws, though: Doug, hiding in the bushes with a flashlight, had caught him soaping their windows on Halloween, but winter had absolved him, and by baseball season he was back in their good graces. He still didn’t know why he had done it. The Kershaws’ was the only house he’d pranked, and it was the home of people he cherished. He’d wanted contact with them, but it had come out wrong. Owen sat with Ben on the school bus every morning. Half asleep, his lunchbox on his lap, he listened to Ben ramble on in his disjointed way about the baseball standings, his mouth falling open between assertions—“If Jerry Priddy didn’t hold the bat so high, he could hit the ball farther”—and his crooked arms mimicking the moves he described: George Kell’s signature scoop at third or Phil Rizzuto’s stretch to loosen his sleeve after throwing someone out. Only Ben, whose bed was like a pass between two mountains of Baseball Digest back issues, would have remembered that Priddy had torn up Rizzuto’s fan letters or that he was the first white guy to talk to Maury Wills. Yet in almost every other way he was slow, and easily influenced by anyone who took the trouble: Mike Terrell lost a year of Kershaw baseball for sending Ben on a snipe hunt. The MacIlhatten twins, Janet and Janice, sat at the back of the bus, two horsey, scheming freshmen who dressed alike, enjoyed pretending to be each other, and amused themselves by playing tricks on Ben, hiding his hat or talking him out of the Mars bar in his lunchbox. They laughed at his blank stare or repeated everything he said until he sat silent in defeat. Idle malice was their game, and, because they were superior students, they got little resistance from adults. Not entirely pretty themselves, they were brutal to Patty Seitz and Sandy Collins, two unattractive girls unlucky enough to ride the same bus, who quietly absorbed the twins’ commentary on their skin, their hair, their Mary Jane shoes, and their Mickey Mouse lunchboxes. Only Stanley Ayotte, who was often suspended, except during football season, when he was a star, stood up to the twins, and to their intervening mother, actually calling them bitches. They flirted with Stanley anyway, though he ignored it. Owen felt the twins’ contemplation of his friendship with Ben: they were watching. At school, they disappeared down the corridor and forgot about him, but on the bus at the end of the day they resumed their focus. His rapt absorption in Ben’s recitation of baseball statistics seemed to annoy them, but, because they knew nothing about the subject, he had been safe so far. The school knew about Ben’s love of sports. His schoolwork was managed with compassion, but water boy for the football team was the best the teachers could come up with on the field. Still, it was a job he loved, running out in front of the crowded bleachers with a tray of water-filled paper cups. “I can’t take him seriously since he shaved.”Buy the print » Church. Owen hated church and fidgeted his way from beginning to end. Or maybe not all of it, not the part where he stared at some girl like Cathy Hansen, the plumber’s beautiful daughter. The moment when Cathy turned from the Communion rail, her hands clasped in front of her face in spiritual rapture, took Owen to a dazed and elevated place. He wondered how a girl like her could stand to listen to a priest drone on about how to get to Heaven. Cathy must have registered his attention. After Mass, she sometimes tried to exchange a pleasantry, but Owen could only impersonate disdain from his reddening face, his agony noticed with amusement by his mother, when she wasn’t gazing down the sidewalk in search of a good spot for a cigarette. After contemplating the suffering of Christ, she needed a bit of relief. Owen’s father had slipped an Ellery Queen novel into the covers of a Daily Missal; he kept his eye on the page, presenting a picture of piety. He saw his presence at the weekly service as an expression of his solidarity with the community, sitting, standing, or kneeling following cues provided by the parishioners around him. The slow drive home after church was a trial for Owen, who could picture the game already under way on the Kershaws’ diamond. Slow because they had to creep past the Ingrams’ driveway. Old Bradley Ingram had married the much younger Julie, who claimed to have been a Radio City dancer but was suspected of having been a stripper at the downtown Gaiety Burlesque house. Now they were separated. Bradley had moved into the Sheraton, and Julie was still in their home, receiving, it was said, all-night visitors. Julie did not mingle locally, and so no information could be got from her. The best Owen’s parents could do was check out her driveway on the way home from church. His father stopped the car so that they could peer between the now unkempt box hedges. His mother said, “It’s a Buick Roadmaster.” “I can’t see the plates. I don’t have my glasses.” “They’re Monroe.” “That tells us nothing.” “Really?” His mother blew smoke at the ceiling of their Studebaker. “Last week it was a Cadillac.” “She’s coming down in the world.” “Not by much,” his mother said, and they drove on. Owen was required to stay at the table for Sunday lunch, which went on until the middle of the afternoon. Usually, he missed the game. In the hardwood forest, a shallow swamp immersed the trunks and roots of the trees near the lake. Owen and Ben hunted turtles among the waterweeds and pale aquatic flowers. The turtles sunned themselves on low branches hanging over the water, in shafts of light spotted with dancing dragonflies. Ever alert, the creatures tumbled into the swamp at the first sound, as though wiped from the branches by an unseen hand. The wild surroundings made Ben exuberant. He bent saplings to watch them recoil or shinnied up trees, and he returned home carrying things that interested him—strands of waterweed, bleached muskrat skulls, or the jack-in-the-pulpits he brought to his mother to fend off her irritation at having to wash another load of muddy clothes. Once, Owen caught two of the less vigilant turtles, the size of fifty-cent pieces, with poignant little feet constantly trying to get somewhere that only they knew. Owen loved their tiny perfection, the flexible undersides of their shells, the ridges down their topside that he could detect with his thumbnail. Their necks were striped yellow, and they stretched them upward in their striving. Owen made a false bottom for his lunchbox with ventilation holes so that he could always have them with him, despite the rule against taking pets to school or on the school bus. He fed them flies from a bottle cap. Only Ben knew where they were. One afternoon, Owen came back from the swamp to find the flashing beacon of the town’s fire truck illuminating the faces of curious neighbors outside his house. He ran up the short length of his driveway in time to see his mother addressing a small crowd as she stood beside two firemen in obsolete leather helmets with brass eagles fixed to their fronts. She looked slightly dishevelled in a housedress and golf-club windbreaker, and she spoke in the lofty voice she used when she had been drinking, the one meant to fend off all questions: “Let he who has never had a kitchen grease fire cast the first stone!” She laughed. “Blame the television. Watching ‘The Guiding Light.’ Mea culpa. A soufflé.” Owen felt the complete bafflement of the neighborhood as he listened. Then her tone flattened. “Look, the fire’s out. Good night, one and all.” Owen’s father’s car nosed up to the group. His father jumped out, tie loosened, radiating authority. He pushed straight through to the firefighters, without glancing at his wife. “Handled?” The shorter of the two nodded quickly. His father spoke to the neighbors: “Looks like not much. I’ll get the details, I’m sure.” Most had wandered off toward their own homes by then, the Kershaws among the last to go. Owen’s father turned to his wife, who was staring listlessly at the ground, placed his broad hand on the small of her back, and moved her through the front door, which he closed behind him, leaving Owen alone in the yard. When Owen went in, his parents were sitting at opposite sides of the kitchen table, the Free Press spread out in front of them. The brown plastic Philco murmured a Van Patrick interview with Birdie Tebbetts: it was the seventh-inning stretch in the Indians game. Owen’s father motioned to him to have a seat, which he did while trying to get the drift of the interview. His mother didn’t look up, except to access the flip lid on her silver ashtray. She held a Parliament between her thumb and middle finger, delicately tapping the ash free with her forefinger. His father flicked the ash from his Old Gold with his thumbnail at the butt of the cigarette and made no particular effort to see that it landed in the heavy glass ashtray by his wrist. Commenting on what he had just read, his father said, “Let’s blow ’em up before they blow us up!” “Who’s this?” his mother said, but got no answer. Instead, she turned to Owen. “Your father and I are going to take a break from each other.” “Oh, yeah?” “We thought you’d want to know.” “Sure.” His father lifted his head to glance at Owen, then returned to the paper. Owen knew better than to say a single word, unless it was about the weather. He wanted his parents to be distracted, so that he could fit in more baseball and get any kind of haircut he liked, but he worried about things falling apart entirely. He was unable to picture what might lie beyond that. School, of course, out there like a black cloud. His mother said, “Ma said she’d take me in.” At this, his father raised his head from the paper. “For God’s sake, Alice, no one is ‘taking you in.’ You’re not homeless.” “Why don’t you go someplace and I’ll stay here? Maybe someone will take you in.” “I’ll tell you why: I’ve got a business to run.” His business, which dispatched plumbers and electricians to emergencies, was called Don’t Get Mad, Get Egan and made the sort of living known as decent. With tradesmen on retainer, he worked from an office, a hole-in-the-wall above a florist’s shop. An answering service gave the impression that it was a bigger operation than it was. “Ma will think you’ve failed.” “Well, you tell Ma I haven’t failed.” “No, you tell her, sport.” “I’m not calling your mother to tell her that I haven’t failed. That doesn’t make sense. Owen, where have you been? You look like you’ve been in the swamp.” “I’ve been in the swamp.” “Would you like to add anything to that?” “No.” His mother stubbed out her cigarette and said, “I think you owe your father a more complete answer, young man.” “It’s nothing more than a little old swamp,” Owen said. “Mind turning that up? It’s the top of the eighth.” Nobody was going anywhere except back to the newspaper. Mr. Kershaw was an agricultural chemist for the state—a white-collar position that was much respected locally—but, despite his sophisticated education and job, he was a country boy through and through, with all the practical and improvisatory skills he’d acquired growing up on a subsistence farm. He wore bib overalls on the weekends and had a passion for Native American history. He was interested in anything from the remote past. He had a closet full of Civil War muskets that had been passed down through his family and a cutlass given by a slave on the Underground Railroad to a forebear who had run a safe house on the way to Canada. This same forebear, by family legend, while pretending to help find a runaway, had pushed a Virginia slave hunter out of a rowboat and held him off with an oar until he drowned. When baseball was rained out one Saturday, Mr. Kershaw took Owen aside. “How’s everything at your house?” “Great,” Owen said suspiciously, assuming he was being asked about the grease fire in the kitchen. Mr. Kershaw looked at him closely and said, “Now, Owen, after it rains I hunt arrowheads. The rain washes away the soil around them, and if you’re lucky you can see them. My boys don’t care, but maybe you’d like to come along.” They drove a few miles to a farm that belonged to a friend of Mr. Kershaw’s. The long plowed rows in front of the farmhouse stretched to a line of trees that shielded the fields from wind off the lake. A depression, not quite plowed in, ran diagonally across the main field, from corner to corner. Buy the print » “That was a creek, Owen. The Pottawatomies hunted and camped along it. Their palisades were right over there, where you see the stacks of the electric plant. So you go down the left side of the old creek, and I’ll go down the right. If you have anything at all on your mind, you will never find an arrowhead.” The two walked in close sight of each other, staring at the ground. From time to time, Mr. Kershaw stooped to examine something, while Owen strained to catch sight of an arrowhead among the stones. At length, Mr. Kershaw summoned him to look at a broken point. Owen was amazed to see how its symmetrical flakes distinguished it from an ordinary stone. When Mr. Kershaw called him over again, he had an arrowhead in his hand, perfect as a jewel. “Bird point,” Mr. Kershaw said, and Owen stared in possessive longing. Mr. Kershaw dropped it into his shirt pocket with a smile. “Don’t think and you’ll find one,” he said. Owen resumed the search with greater intensity as they approached the row of trees, whose tops were ignited by lake light. Sticking out of a clod was a pale-white object that Owen picked up and gazed at without recognition. “What’ve you got there?” Mr. Kershaw called. “Bring it here.” Owen crossed the depression and handed it to Mr. Kershaw. “Oh, you lucky boy. It’s a—” He shook dirt from it. “French trade pipe. Indians got them from the trappers such a long time ago. Want to swap for my arrowhead?” “Which is worth more?” Mr. Kershaw laughed. “Probably your trade pipe, but that’s a good question. So good, in fact, that I’ll give you my arrowhead. Perhaps I’ll find another.” He reached into his shirt pocket, removed the arrowhead, and dropped it, warm, into Owen’s palm, where its glittering perfection nearly overwhelmed him. The ground had dried, and by the time Owen got back to the diamond the other boys were choosing up sides. Mike Stallings was captain of one team and Bobby Waldron captain of the other. Owen wanted to put his finds in a safe place; he ran toward his house, a hand pressed over the lumps of arrowhead and clay pipe in his shirt pocket, the late sun starting to flash from the windows of the neighborhood, a lake freighter moaning as it passed to the east. The early football game with Flat Rock a week later was played under lights and in the mud from another afternoon rain. It was a bloody affair from the start, with poorly understood game plans and pent-up, random excitement among the players. At the end of the first quarter, Ben dashed out with his tray of water, tripped, and fell in a melee of paper cups. The stands erupted in laughter. Owen ran onto the field and squatted beside Ben to pick up the mess, stacking wet cups while Ben stood by, helpless and ashamed. The players waited, hands on hips, while Ben and Owen carried the remains back to the sidelines. The game resumed, and Owen wandered behind the bleachers, hoping that Flat Rock would kick the home team’s asses and give the handful of visitors something to cheer about. He headed over to the parking lot, thinking he might spot some Oldsmobile spinner hubcaps to steal for his collection but settled for a set of Pontiac baby moons, which he stashed in the bushes, to be picked up later. The car didn’t look quite the same with its greasy wheel studs exposed, and he really wanted to stop there, but then he saw Bradley Ingram’s Thunderbird and soon had all four of its dog-dish ten-inch caps. On the bus the next morning, the twins were arguing with each other, a welcome change, as it kept their attention away from others. Ben watched them with delight, despite all their teasing. The twins were as knowledgeable about radio hits as Ben was about baseball, and he was drawn to their statistical world. Also, he had begun to notice girls. These days he often sat at the back of the bus by the twins, who seemed to regard him as a trophy stolen from Owen. They sensed that Owen’s popularity was falling, and they enjoyed seeing him sitting by himself. On good days now, Ben was their playmate, their mascot. They alone—thanks to their status—could make liking Ben fashionable. Owen used his new privacy to peek into the false bottom of his lunchbox and check on the well-being of his turtles. He liked finding his bottle cap empty of flies. The safety patrol, an unsmiling senior with angry acne and an attitude that went with the official white belt across his chest, had been steadily expanding his list of prohibitions from standing while the bus was in motion to eating from lunchboxes and arm wrestling. He had never bothered Owen but appeared to watch him in expectation of an infraction. Owen watched him back. The low autumn light left barely enough time for a few innings after school. The chalk on the base paths had faded into the underlying dirt, and a ring of weeds had formed around third base. Horse chestnuts were strewn across the road between the Kershaws’ house and the diamond. Somehow, partial teams were fielded, though even the meagrest grounders ended up in the outfield, to be run down by Stanley Ayotte, who was proud of his arm and managed to rifle them back. Shortstop had been eliminated for lack of candidates. The score ran up quickly. Owen’s father appeared and boomed that an umpire was needed. He hung his suit coat on the backstop, tugged his tie to one side, stepped behind the catcher, folded his arms behind him, and bent forward for the next pitch. There was no next pitch. The players saw his condition, and the game dissolved. As Owen started to walk home with his father, Mr. Kershaw, observant, came out his front door and gave them a curt wave. Owen tried to think of hubcaps he didn’t have yet, while his father strode along, looking far ahead into some empty place toward home. On the school bus the next day, Owen fielded questions about “the ump” and sat quietly, sensing the small movements of the turtles in the bottom of his lunchbox, which was otherwise filled with the random sorts of things his mother put in there—Hostess Twinkies, not particularly fresh fruit, packaged peanut-butter-and-crackers. Ben was sitting on the broad bench seat at the back, between the twins, who tied things in his hair and pretended to help him with his homework while enjoying his incomprehension. He must have begun to feel rewarded by his limitations. The twins whispered to each other and to Ben and made his face red with the things they said. Then Ben told the twins about Owen’s turtles, and the twins told the safety patrol, who towered over Owen’s seat and asked to see his lunchbox. “Why do you want to see it?” “Give it to me.” “No.” The safety patrol worked his way forward to the driver and said something, then returned. “Give it to me or I’m putting you off the bus.” Owen slowly handed the lunchbox to him. The safety patrol undid the catch, opened the lid, and dumped the food. Then he pried out the false bottom and looked in. “You know the rules,” he said. He gingerly lifted the turtles out of the box, leaned toward an open window, and threw them out. Owen jumped up to see them burst on the pavement. He fell back into his seat and pulled his coat over his head. “You knew the rules,” the safety patrol said. Life went on as though nothing had happened, and nothing really had happened. Ben was the twins’ plaything for several months, and then something occurred that no one wanted to talk about—if one twin was asked about it, the question was referred to the other—and Ben had to transfer to a special school, one where he couldn’t come and go as he pleased, or maybe it was worse than that, since he was never seen at home again or in town or on the football field with his water tray. Owen continued to attend the football games, not to watch but to wander the darkened parking lot, building his hubcap collection. As time went on, it wasn’t only the games: any public event would do.

There’d nearly been a fight. People were drinking wine like it was beer and a man Sam didn’t know had thumped the table and shouted that “House of Cards” was better than “Breaking Bad” and “Mad Men,” put together. —All the seasons! The man had knocked over a glass. A woman had thrown a fistload of peanuts at him, although most of them had bounced off the table. She seemed to be defending “Mad Men” or “Breaking Bad.” Sam wasn’t sure. He hadn’t seen either. His wife, Emer, had been in the middle of it, too, standing up for “The Killing,” the Danish version. Sam hadn’t seen “The Killing,” and he hadn’t a clue how Emer had managed it. They’d walked home, staggering a bit. —When did you watch “The Killing”? —I didn’t. —It seemed like you did. —Yeah, well, I didn’t. But, like, everyone says it’s brilliant. He’d watched it since. Seasons 1, 2, and 3. And it was brilliant. He’d watched “The Bridge,” too. And “Love/Hate,” all four seasons. And a good chunk of “The Wire.” They were all great. But he’d felt late getting to them. Too late, and too slow. He knew that, if the same people were to meet around a table now, they’d be getting worked up about a whole new bunch of box sets, or something new on Netflix, and he’d be lost again. He’d watched “The Killing” alone, while Emer was at work. He’d watched most of Season 1 in a day. It was mesmerizing. He’d been going to buy Emer one of the striped jumpers the detective, Sarah Lund, wore. But he’d done a search—three hundred and ten euros, for a genuine one from the Faroe Islands. There was no way he was spending that kind of money, not now. He didn’t have a job. That still felt like a smack, three months later. Just when they’d both begun to think they’d survived the worst of it, when they were starting to hear and believe the optimism on the radio—We’re seeing light at the end of the tunnel. This is great news for Ireland Inc.—he’d been called in for a chat. He’d started sending out the C.V.s the day after he came home jobless. He’d signed up with an agency. He’d even ticked the box that let them know he was prepared to go to the U.K., Australia, or Canada. It would be temporary. It could be exciting. He hadn’t hesitated. But nothing. He was too slow, again. Too late. One of the banks was advertising mortgages for people who were thinking of coming back home to Ireland from the U.K., Australia, and Canada. They’d be fine. Emer said it, and they said it together. They touched glasses and smiled. They’d tighten the belts, just a bit. They’d renegotiate the mortgage, but only when they had to. They’d stretch the six remaining years to twelve, or fifteen. —We’ll drink less. —No way. They laughed. She patted the dog on her lap. —And we’ll feed you a bit less, Chester, she said. Cos you’re a fat little fucker, aren’t you. He wasn’t fat—the dog. Neither was Sam. Just when they’d thought they were safe. They weren’t alone in thinking that. The recipe books were a sign of the shift. Whenever they went to people’s houses—and they did it a lot, on Friday and Saturday evenings, the homes of people Emer knew from work or old friends she’d kept in touch with—they were given food that was supposedly eaten on the streets of cities that Sam associated with bombings or destitution. Beirut street food, Mumbai street food. Jerusalem was the latest—Ottolenghi. The recipe book was always on the kitchen counter, and they’d have to hear the tale of the hunt for the ingredients before they were allowed to eat. Not that he objected to the food. He cooked a bit himself. Dublin street food, and the odd Mexican or Far Eastern dish. But, anyway, that was the start of the country’s comeback, he’d thought. And Emer had agreed with him. The street-food books—the money to buy them and the money to use them, the tiny bit of ostentation. The books on the counter, and the box sets piled beside the telly. One night, he’d even made up a story about a couple on the Southside who’d served up barbecued fox—medieval street food. He’d added a joust in the back garden and an outbreak of cholera before everyone around the table realized that he was joking. That was the last time he’d been funny. Something had snapped, or sagged, a few weeks after he was let go. Someone sitting beside him at a different dinner, someone else he didn’t know, had asked him what he did and he hadn’t been able to answer. Not a word. The next time Emer had told him they were going to someone’s house on a Friday he’d said no. —What? “Give me a minute—I’m working on my core.” Buy the print » She hadn’t looked at him yet. She was just in from work, concentrating on the dog. —I’d prefer not to, Sam said. He hated the sound of that, the voice and the words, the pompous little boy. But he’d said it. —Why not? she asked. She was sitting on the kitchen floor, shoving the dog across the tiles and enjoying his return. She looked up at Sam. —Ah, Sam said. I don’t . . . I just . . . —What? —Why is it always your decision? —Hang on, she said. What? She was standing now, taking her coat off. —What did you say? she asked. I mean, what do you mean? She smiled. —Well, he said. Why is it like that? —Sorry—like what? —You come home and announce we’re going to Fifi’s house— —Fiona’s. —Grand. Sorry. But you never ask. —Ask what? —If, like. If I want to go—or if we should go. —What’s wrong? —Nothing’s wrong. —There’s something wrong. —There isn’t. —Is it the job? —No, it’s not the fuckin’ job. —Sam. —What? —Just stop it. —Stop what? —Ah, Sam, she said. Listen. She was moving again, across the kitchen. She was brilliant at this, making normality out of the tension. She put the kettle under the tap. —Sam, she said. —Don’t patronize me, Sam said. —I’m talking to you. —O.K. —I know what you’re going through. Don’t say anything. I know it must be terrible—O.K.? But you’ll get another job, wait and see. You’re highly skilled. He let her go on. —This is temporary, she said. She tossed a tea bag into a mug. —Agreed? Sam? —O.K., he said. —You think that, too, I know. You know. It’s temporary. —Yeah, he said. —So, she said. We keep on going. Business as usual. She was working the top off the moka pot now, making him coffee. He didn’t drink tea. —I suppose so, he said. But it’s been three months. —That’s nothing, she said. We’ve both heard about people who were waiting for years. But it wasn’t about the job, or any job, or how he’d spend the time. —It’s just, like . . . —What? she said. She smiled. It amazed him, how she managed that. It never looked frozen or insincere. She loved him. Her tea was in her hands, his coffee was on the gas. —All these invitations, he said. —They’re not invitations, she said back. It’s not formal. They’re, like, just, people—friends. —Yeah, but your friends. I know no one. —You do. —Not really. —Come on, Sam. They’re our friends. —Some of them, he said. —Is that not enough? The pot was bubbling. He took a mug from the shelf. He took the pot off the gas. —Thanks, he said. —No worries. He sipped the coffee, and gave her the thumbs-up. —Why don’t you volunteer? she said. —What? —Do stuff, she said. You know. Meet people. —People? —Stop it, Sam. You know what people are. Everybody’s volunteering these days. —I don’t want to fuckin’ volunteer, he said. —Why not? What’s wrong? I’m worried about you, Sam. Really, I am. He said nothing—he couldn’t think of anything. He didn’t want the coffee; he could feel it burning his gut. —It’ll give a shape to your day, she said. Sam? —Listen, he said. Emer. —Go on. She looked so eager there, so ready to help. He threw the mug. He walked ahead as the dog ran back for the ball. He walked into the wind and the bit of rain. It wasn’t dark yet. The sun was a lump sinking behind the city. He’d apologized to Emer, and said he’d bring the dog for a walk, get some air. He couldn’t look at her. He’d found the dog’s ball and lead in the drawer under the sink, and he’d left. He’d called bye from the front door but she hadn’t answered. The dog was back. He dropped the ball in front of Sam. —Good man. It bounced, and rolled off the path onto the grass. Sam moved to pick it up. And it happened. A guy on a bike went into him. But Sam didn’t know that. All he knew was the pain. He was on the ground by the time what had happened began to assemble itself. He saw the bike, and the guy sprawled on the path a bit farther away. He heard a noise he didn’t recognize. It took him a while to know that he was making it. Grunting, blowing, pushing back the pain. He could hear the skid now, the sound of the guy pulling the brake. He heard the guy’s protest. —Get out of the way! Now he heard the guy groaning, and a wave hitting the other side of the seawall. He heard himself. Breathing like he’d been running for hours, shoving the air out. Bellowing. He didn’t know if he could move. There was no one else around. Normally, this time of day, there’d be other people walking their dogs, or running, or even the homeless lads looking for somewhere to hide for the night. But there was no one. “The crime scene down the hall has crap vermouth.”Buy the print » He moved a leg—he could. He rolled to his side. He lifted himself. Jesus, though, God. Jesus, the pain. He kept going. He felt huge. He stood up out of the wet and the injustice; that was how he felt, was how he saw himself. Made monstrous. The guy was sitting, rolling his shoulder, bleeding from his mouth. Sam roared over to the bike. That was what it was, what it felt like. Roaring, not walking. He was noise. He got across to the bike. He picked it up—it had no weight—and he threw it over the low wall, into the sea. He didn’t look at the guy. The Lycra fucker. He said nothing to him and he heard nothing. Anger got him home. Blind fury got him home. He shouldn’t have been able to do it. It was usually a ten-minute walk. He didn’t know how long it took. He’d no memory of it, after. He got back up the hill. To the house. He met no one. He got to the gate, and the door. He fell into the hall. He lay there. The pain was new—the shock was outrageous. The charge home had been an interruption. He fell to the rug and it started all over again. Emer was there. So was her case. Right at his head, where he’d landed. She pushed it, wheeled it, out of their way. But it was there, behind her as she got down on her knees beside him. —What happened? He roared again now. There was a ceiling over him. The front door was closed. —Sam? He roared once more. —What happened to you? —The dog. She looked for bite marks. She searched him for blood. —I left the dog. It made no sense. What he’d said to Emer. He knew that. She was wearing her coat. —The dog, he said again. The words hurt. Just speaking. They were followed by a groan, a yelp. —I’ll find him, she said. She understood. But she stayed where she was. She put her hands on his chest. —What happened? —He went right into my back. —The dog? He was afraid to gasp properly. The effort shook his ribs. They were broken. They had to be. —Bike, he said. Prick on a bike. —God. —He went right into me. —God. —Sorry, he said. The anger was gone and the real pain was climbing out of him. —Can you move your legs? Emer asked. —Think so. He didn’t remind her that he’d just walked up from the seafront. He’d do whatever she told him to. —O.K., she said. Carefully. Move your left leg. Lift it. He did. —Slowly, she said. That’s great. Down, slowly. Now the right. —The dog. —He’ll be grand. O.K. Your spine’s not broken anyway. —Jesus. He was breathing through his mouth. He couldn’t close it. —Lift your arm. He lifted his right hand. She held it, helped him. The pain. Something was ripping, already ripped. —Oh Jesus, oh Jesus! She brought his hand back down to the rug. —The other one. Sam? —What? —Your other hand. It was bad, bad—but not as bad. —Good, she said. Can you lie on your side? She got him to bed. She held his elbow and stayed a step below him on the stairs. She had to cut his jumper off him; he couldn’t lift his arms. She stood behind him with the scissors. She sliced from the bottom up, to his neck. She came back around and pulled the sleeves off his arms. She watched as he lowered himself onto the bed. He groaned, he puffed—he couldn’t lie back. She got pillows from elsewhere, and came back. She piled them until he could sit and let go. —Thanks. He was alone. She’d gone. He heard her on the stairs. He heard the bell. He heard the front door—she was opening it. He heard a voice, a man’s. A taxi-driver? It wasn’t a conversation—it was too short. The door closed. He heard her boots on the path outside. He couldn’t hear the wheels of her case. He couldn’t move. He could, but it was awful. More minutes of gasping. He didn’t know what to do. He was stuck and the house was empty. He’d never sleep. She woke him. It was dark. —Sam? She was still wearing her coat. She’d been out in the cold; he could smell it. —Hi. He hadn’t moved. He was still sitting back, against all of the house’s pillows. —I found Chester, she said. —Great. Talking, that one word, rubbed against the pain. He sucked in. —All right? —Yeah, he said. Where was he? —Down where you left him. —O.K. —He was fine. —O.K. —There was no sign of the cyclist. —O.K. —Or the bike. He said nothing. She was gone again. He woke. She wasn’t in the bed. It was still dark. He’d no idea what time it was. He couldn’t read his watch and he couldn’t move, shift, to see the clock on the table just behind his head. He’d been so angry when he left the house. He’d dragged the anger down the street with the dog, and along the seafront. He’d left behind a smashed mug and a crying woman. “Nice—what do you charge?”Buy the print » —I’m leaving, she’d said while he was putting the lead on the dog. He’d thrown the mug at the wall, above the cooker. —Don’t let me stop you, he’d said, looking at the dog’s neck. He was an idiot. Emer was right; they’d be fine. They’d have to be—he’d have to be. He could hear nothing in the house. He had to go to the toilet. He had to move. He turned, kind of rolled to his right. He pulled back the yell, sucked it back down. He didn’t want to hear it. He sent his feet out. The right one touched the floor. He rolled again. He was off the bed, on his knees—a little kid saying his prayers. He straightened his back. Christ, Jesus. He stood up. He walked out to the landing. He leaned on the wall, and the door frame. Across to the bathroom. He had to bend to lift the seat. Christ, Christ. He pissed, he flushed. Back out to the landing. He could hear nothing else, just himself, just his breath. She might have been in one of the other bedrooms. He went back across to their room. He stopped. He turned—the change of direction stabbed him. He went for the stairs. The drop to the hall looked deep and dark. Each step was agony. No, sore. Just sore. Very sore. He made it to the bottom. Her case was gone, not in the hall. He got to the kitchen. There was sweat on his forehead, drenching his hair. He went to the sink. He took the dirty dishes and mugs out of the basin. He let the hot tap run, and squirted some washing-up liquid into the water. He dropped in a cloth. He turned off the tap. He lifted the basin—he gave it a go. Down his right side, pain carved a road. He put the basin back in the sink. He leaned against it, got his breath back. That was probably as bad as it was going to get. He hoisted the basin and took it the few steps over to the cooker. The broken mug was still there. It hadn’t really smashed. It was broken, but only in two halves, along an old crack. He wrung out the cloth and leaned over the cooker, to get at the coffee stains. But he stopped well short of the wall. The pain pulled him back. He found the steps beside the back door. The dog was out in the shed. Unless Emer had taken him. If she wasn’t in the house. He was tempted to go out there to check. But he didn’t. The steps weren’t heavy, just awkward. He couldn’t lift them properly. They whacked at his shins as he took them over to the cooker. The sweat was in his eyes now. It was cold, too; he was freezing. He looked at the wall clock. It was just after three. He unfolded the steps. He waited a while. He wiped the sweat from his eyes and forehead, back into his hair. He grabbed the cloth and got onto the first step. And the next one. The third. He kept his back straight. He could feel the ceiling just over his head. He kneeled on the cooker, on the grille on top of the gas rings. It was a different pain, a normal, stupid pain; he’d take the punishment. He leaned on the wall with his left hand. The road of pain had split in two, the new one curving under the bottom rib across his right side. He’d never be able to get back down. She’d find him like this in the morning. And they’d laugh. They’d be fine; it wouldn’t be too bad. The future measured in box sets. “The Killing”—he’d watch it again, with her. “The Bridge,” “Borgen.” The Danish ones, all the seasons. There was a year in them, at least. He was already picking up a bit of Danish from watching the first season of “Borgen.” Goddag, kaffe, spin doktor. He’d get involved in something; he’d volunteer, do what she’d suggested. Something he could care about; there were plenty of things. He’d get a bike, and a backpack. Join a walking club and a choir. He’d read more. He’d have the dinner ready for when she came home from work. He’d follow her out on Fridays, wherever she wanted to go. He lifted his arm and brought the cloth across some of the stains. They came away nicely. She’d see the clean wall when she got up, or came home. He’d say nothing. He took a breath and lifted his right arm again. Thirty years of box sets. They were living in a golden age of television drama. He’d read that somewhere. And he believed it.

Paul Espeseth, who was no longer taking the antidepressant Celexa, braced himself for a cataclysm at SeaWorld. He wondered only what form cataclysm would take. Espeseth had tried to veto this trip, making his case to his wife with a paraphrase of a cable-television exposé of the ocean theme park, one that neither he nor his wife had seen. Instead, his wife had performed judo on his argument, saying, “The girls should see these things they love before they vanish from the earth entirely.” So here he was. The first step, it seemed, involved flamingos. After he had hustled his four-year-old twins through the turnstiles and past the souvenirs, the stuffed-animal versions of the species they’d come to confront in fleshly actuality, his family followed the park’s contours and were met with the birds. Their red-black cipher heads bobbed on pink, tight-feathered stalks, floating above the heads of a crowd of fresh entrants. “Wait your turn, girls,” his wife said. Yet, seeing that no turns were being taken, Espeseth led Chloe and Deirdre by the hands and together they jostled forward into the mob to find a vantage on the birds. His wife stayed back, tending the double stroller draped with their junk. Closer, Espeseth saw that the birds were trapped on an island, a neat-mowed mound of grass ringed with a small fence and signs saying “Please Do Not Feed.” “Can you see them?” he stage-whispered down at the girls, as if the clump of exotic birds were something wild spotted in the distance, a flock that could bolt and depart. Really, they’d had some crucial feather clipped, rendering them flightless, the equivalent of crippling an opponent in a fight by slicing his Achilles tendon. The birds had no prospect of retreat from the barrage of screaming families pushing their youngest near enough for a cell-phone pic. “I’m scared,” Deirdre said. “They’re scared, too,” he told her. As am I. The flamingos were the first thing for which nothing could have prepared him. Having already watched with his girls a hundred YouTube videos of orcas, having already scissored magazine pictures of orcas and cuddled his children to sleep in beds full of stuffed orcas, Paul Espeseth had hardened his soul in readiness for orcas—their muscular poignancy, their mute drama, the chance that they might in full view and to a soundtrack of inspirational music disarticulate one of their neoprene-suited trainers at the elbow or the neck. But the designers of the park had outsmarted him, softened him up with flamingos, like a casual round of cigarette burns to the rib cage, preceding a waterboarding. The girls found their boldness and pushed up to the front, then relented, and were supplanted in turn by other eager, deprived children, presenting their faces in what he imagined was for the birds a wave of florid psychosis. In the context of their species, these flamingos were like space voyagers, those who’d return with tales beyond telling. Except that they’d never return. You might as well have immersed the birds in a bathysphere and introduced them to the orcas, or dosed their food with lysergic acid. “Let’s go,” he said, tugging the twins away. Their morsel hands had begun to sweat in his, or he’d begun to sweat onto them. “There’s a lot . . . else.” “Orca show!” both girls yelped. It was what they’d come for. “The show starts at eleven,” he told them. “We’ve got a little time. And there’s stuff on the way. Sharks.” He’d gathered the implications of the map at a glance: short of parachuting in, you couldn’t get to Shamu Stadium without first passing other enticements. He steered for sharks and giant tortoises, if only as a gambit for skirting the Sesame Street Bay of Play, and a roller coaster called Manta. He had standards. SeaWorld should keep the promise of its name: close encounters with fathoms-deep fauna, not birds, not Elmo, not Princess Leia or Cap’n Crunch. He hardly felt in command of his family’s progress here, as they curved on the pathways. He felt squeezed into grooves of expertly predicted responses and behavior, of expenditures of sweat and hilarity and currency from his wallet and also his soul. He was as helpless as a pinball coursing in a tabletop machine. Not one of those simple and friendly, gently decaying machines he’d known in Minneapolis arcades in the seventies, either, but a raging, pulsing nineties-type of pinball machine, half a dozen neon paddles slapping at his brain. It seemed too much to hope for another Legoland miracle. Two months earlier, Espeseth and his wife and their twin daughters had gone south to visit Legoland. Legoland had been tolerable. Legoland had had variations, textures, edges. It featured some bad zones, including, outstandingly, the bogus municipality called Fun Town, but others were O.K., better than O.K., like the clutch of restaurants on Castle Hill. There, while the twins got their picture taken with the Queen, and jousted on Lego horses riveted to a train track, he’d been able to sneak off to Castle Ice Cream and obtain a double espresso. That had been something. Hidden with his espresso in a shady quadrant of the castle courtyard, he’d silently toasted his daughters as they’d one after the other rounded the rail. Though he supposed he had Legoland to blame: its tolerability had led him too easily into agreeing to SeaWorld, which even on Celexa, he now saw, would have been another prospect entirely. His shrink, Irving Renker, had given him a warning about the effects of leaching Celexa from his brain. Espeseth had at the time of the conversation been free of the medicine for just two days. He was quitting under Renker’s guidance, such as it was. “Prepare yourself,” Renker told him. “You might see bums and pickpockets.” “See in the sense of hallucinate?” “No,” Renker said. “You won’t hallucinate. I mean see in the sense of notice. You may disproportionately notice bums and pickpockets. Creeps. Perverts. Even amputees.” Irving Renker was a Jewish New Yorker who’d crawled out of his archetype like a lobster from its shell, still conforming to that shell’s remorseless shape but wandering around fresh, tender, and amazed. Renker advocated physical exercise, and could be seen navigating the crests of Santa Barbara’s hills on his bicycle, wearing a helmet and shades as well as an office-ready sweater, blue slacks, and leather-soled shoes. Espeseth had never seen him in the flats, let alone near the beach. He suspected that Renker’s wife did all their grocery shopping. Renker’s office was in an in-law apartment nestled in the scrubby hills behind the psychiatrist’s home, itself raised on stilts to meet the angle of the terrain. Renker’s front-window drapes were always drawn, thwarting curious eyes. Was there a secret intellectual-Jew hovel there, with book-lined shelves, Sigmundian fetish masks, funky, unfumigatable Persian carpets? No way to know. The consultation room was bland: framed abstract watercolors, beige upholstery, brass clock. Renker’s conversation included, along with the phrases “Keep it simple” and “Don’t overthink,” terms like “black folks,” “Oriental,” “gypped,” and “bum.” Once, as Espeseth reminisced at length about sitting with his three brothers in the front seat of his father’s pickup truck on a fishing expedition, Renker had murmured, “Yes, yes, that’s known as ‘riding Mexican.’ ” Espeseth never confronted or corrected his shrink. Instead, he’d gently offer examples of appropriate speech, in this case by replying, “Does this mean that the Celexa was, what, making me blind to homeless people? Or more likely to get robbed?” “It’s a question of emphasis,” Renker said. “You may tend to notice scumbags, to the detriment of those standing to the right and the left of them. I don’t want to suggest you’ll become paranoid, but you may also project scumbaggery onto ordinary people.” That his shrink believed in “ordinary people” was a bad sign if Espeseth dwelled on it; he tried not to. It was what Renker said next that he couldn’t shake off. “In withdrawal from Celexa some patients have described a kind of atmosphere of rot or corruption or peril creeping around the edges of the everyday world, a thing no one but they can identify. A colleague of mine labelled this ‘grub-in-meat syndrome.’ Better to be prepared than have it sneak up on you.” Grub-in-meat syndrome? No one, not shrink Renker, not Espeseth’s wife, certainly not the twins, no human listener outside the containment zone of his skull, knew that Paul Espeseth had renamed himself Pending Vegan. His secret name was a symptom, if it should be considered a symptom, that had overtaken him months before he quit the Celexa. Could it be a side effect? He’d hoped it would abate when he went off the drug. No such luck. Pending Vegan wasn’t completely sorry. His new name was a mortification, yes, but he clung to it, for it also held some promise of an exalted life, one just beyond reach. How had his researches begun? Espeseth, when that had been his only name, had checked out of Santa Barbara’s public library a popular account of the world’s collapse into unsustainability under the weight of its human population. He’d gone from that to reading several famous polemics against the cruelty of farms and slaughterhouses. Next, a book called “Fear of the Animal Planet,” which detailed acts of beastly revenge upon human civilization. It was then that Espeseth felt himself becoming Pending Vegan. A knowledge had been born inside him, the development of which only inertia and embarrassment and conformity could slow. Fortunately or unfortunately, Pending Vegan was rich in these delaying properties. Buy the print » The great obstacle would be in explaining his decision to his daughters. Pending Vegan admired Chloe’s and Deirdre’s negotiation between their native animal-love and the pleasures of meat-eating. It struck him as a hard-won sophistication, something like F. Scott Fitzgerald’s capacity to keep two opposed ideas in mind at the same time. The girls’ early rites of passage seemed to consist mainly of such paradox-absorbing efforts. That, for instance, Mommy and Daddy fought but loved each other. That human beings were miraculous and shyness ought to be overcome, yet also that they should violently distrust the too eager stranger as a probable monster. That an hour of television or the iPad should be judged an intoxicating surfeit, while parents binged on screens at every opportunity. Pending Vegan routinely spent three hours sitting on the couch, watching his football team lose. The Vikings, talisman of his ancestral roots. Yet, unlike the Redskins and the Chiefs, they never had their name and logo criticized as racist. No one felt sorry for white people, which might explain his fascination with Jews, who seemed to have it both ways. Had Irving Renker been eavesdropping on Pending Vegan’s thoughts, he would have chortled. Quit drifting. Civilizing children was pretty much all about inducing cognitive dissonance. His daughters’ balancing of their desire both to cuddle and to devour mammals was their ticket for entry to the human pageant. If Pending Vegan admitted to them that he now believed it wrong to eat animals—even while he still craved the tang of smoky steaks and salt-greasy bacon—he’d lower himself, in their eyes, to a state of childlike moral absolutism. Or perhaps it would be in his own eyes? He’d been Pending now for six months. Some otherworldly future inquisitor, most likely a pearly-gates sentinel with the head of a piglet or a calf, would hold him accountable for this delay, a thing comparable to the period when the Allies had learned of the existence of the death camps yet checked their moral outrage against military-tactical considerations. Nothing had changed in his eating habits or other behaviors. He hadn’t distributed pamphlets or obtained a bumper sticker. Nothing had changed, except that he had awarded himself a secret name. Boiling in shame, he led his family into the shark-observation area, trudging onto a moving walkway behind other families and their strollers. Another piece of coercive architecture, the passage tunnelled beneath the sharks’ tanks, illuminating the creatures from below, the better to consider their white bellies and jack-o’-lantern grimaces. It struck him now that the park’s design was somehow alimentary. You were being engulfed, digested, shit out. “I’m scared,” Deirdre said. “But I’m not,” Chloe said. Pending Vegan didn’t presume to speak for the sharks. He pointed instead at the glimmer ahead, as the moving walkway ground them out of the darkness. “Daddy?” Chloe said. “Yes?” “Are dolphins and killer whales really people’s pets that went back into the sea?” “Not pets,” Pending Vegan said. “Wild animals. Like pigs.” He shuddered at the proliferating confusion: the girls knew pigs as farm animals. Just that morning he’d been surreptitiously reading a blog named The Call of the Feral. The classes of the subjugated: Pet, Domesticated, Feral, Wild . . . “Why can’t we have a pet?” Chloe asked. Pending Vegan’s wife turned to him. He avoided her eyes, but felt them anyway. “Your father doesn’t like pets,” his wife said. “Almost time for the eleven-o’clock show!” he said, desperate to change the subject. And so they slugged out of the shark gallery’s gullet into daylight. All of SeaWorld was squirming. Grub-in-meat syndrome, the suggestion that Renker had unhelpfully planted, was itself a grub squirming in the meat of Pending Vegan’s mind. They’d had a Jack Russell terrier, a neutered two-year-old male named Maurice that they’d adopted from a shelter, a total freaking maniac whom his wife had adored and he—well, Pending Vegan had also adored the dog, though it had been like living with a puzzle he couldn’t solve. Maurice moved at bewildering speeds, leaped vertically like an illegal firework, demanded everything, and invaded all their most intimate spaces. And then—and this, the reason that any mention of pets on the part of the girls chastened him, and the reason that his wife’s gaze froze his blood—when Pending Vegan had seen the dog’s behavior around his pregnant wife, he’d banished Maurice from their lives. The dog had been too attentive, too obsessed with her pregnancy, curling itself along her stomach at night as if hatching the twins with its own heat. Maurice had begun snapping at Pending Vegan when he approached his own marital bed. In the third trimester, he’d taken the dog back to the shelter, and though this was barely forgivable, perhaps not forgivable at all, after the babies came Maurice was never mentioned again. The girls had no way of knowing they’d been womb-cuddled by Maurice, unless their mother one day told them. Chloe and Deirdre instead stanched their mammalian craving with Pixar creatures. Driving here, they’d been attention-glued to video screens mounted on the backs of their parents’ headrests. This spared them the sameness of I-5, its repetitious suburban exits, noise-barrier walls, and dead yellowed hills. Near San Diego, a road sign showed a silhouette of a fleeing Mexican family, like moose or deer, not to be hit in their illegal flight across the freeway’s five lanes. Pending Vegan felt blessed to be excused from explaining it. Family life, a cataclysm of solitudes. As a boy he’d endured back-seat travel without the help of movies. Instead he’d directed his gaze out the family station wagon’s windows, past a zillion miles of the Chippewa National Forest, the U.P., and southern portions of Ontario and Manitoba. As a ten-year-old, in his ecology phase, he’d invented a time-killing game, known, like his new name, only to himself. In this fantasy, Espeseth’s parents’ car featured a long invisible knife, like the wing of a plane, which could extend or retract from the side of the station wagon according to his mental instructions. He and his parents were only pretending to be nobodies, the sole Protestant family from the suburb nicknamed St. Jewish Park. In truth, they were emissaries from another world, sent to reclaim the landscape from the intrusions of the human species. He alone was orchestrating the blade, which shot out to lop off each electrical pole and road sign, and retracted to spare as many trees as possible in the effort. Houses, and other cars, it sliced through mercilessly. His fantasy even included an alibi-providing element of delay, which explained both his not getting to see the glorious destruction he’d wreaked and why no human authority was able to locate and neutralize the mysterious force that tore through his surroundings: the sliced objects fell apart five minutes after his family’s car passed by. By this method, the earth would be returned to the flora and fauna. Lately the image of the invisible blade had returned to Pending Vegan. It would come at the sight of some architectural abomination, or a roadside blighted with billboards. SeaWorld, however, was impervious to the fantasy. Had he begun slicing up this labyrinth of discord, he’d merely murder the creatures trapped within it. By the logic of his childhood fantasy the blade would free the tortoises and the sharks and the porpoises from their tanks, to pour out and die gasping in sunlight on the concrete walkways. Once inside Shamu Stadium, contra Renker, Pending Vegan noticed no bums and pickpockets. In Shamu Stadium he noticed furloughed military. The soldiers between rotations, out for a day trip with their families, their unfamiliar young children and stoical neglected wives, to see the killer whales. They were knowable by their short haircuts and bicep tattoos, by the wary swivel of their thickened necks. In their upright stolidity it was as though various civilian bodies had all been poured into the same unforgiving mold. Ethnicities reduced to traces in the soldiers were more tangible in the wives and children—in Renkerian terms, mostly black folks, Mexicans, and Orientals. Maybe even a scattering of Gypsies? How to know? Simplify, simplify. Perhaps it was the servicemen who would provide the calamity that Pending Vegan’s nervous system shrieked for. He envisioned helicopter footage, yellow tape, SWAT teams milling beside inconsolable families. The stadium was a Mayan temple, one waiting for some sacrifice in the blue pool below. Yet, trapped here with five thousand others, Pending Vegan felt for the moment stilled in his crisis. If his voyage through SeaWorld’s tubes and tunnels was a sort of peristalsis, he’d reached its multi-chambered stomach. And, after the insipid triumphalist overture of music and video and prancing androgynous spandex, when the orcas finally entered the arena and began their leaping, SeaWorld was overwritten by their absolute and devastating presence. By their act of stitching two realms together, sky and water, merely for the delight of a stadium full of children—children who, in response, leaped, too, and vibrated in their seats, and gurgled incoherently, practically speaking in tongues. Other kids, older and more intrepid than his own, raced down to the plastic barrier to be splashed, to stand with their arms flapping. The killer whales, with their Emmett Kelly eyes, were God’s glorious lethal clowns. Their plush muscular bodies were the most unashamed things Pending Vegan had ever seen. Like panda bears redesigned by Albert Speer. Always with the Holocaust references, Renker once said. Why don’t you leave that to us? The twins sat between him and his wife, holding hands, their eyes wide, their incorruptible appetites overwhelmed. “Deirdre’s scared,” Chloe said. “No, I’m not,” Deirdre said. She spoke dreamily, not taking her eyes from the pool. Pending Vegan ached to enclose the girls in some kind of protective partition extending from his damaged soul. But the girls were not enclosable, as the stadium was not enclosable, as the world was not. They were all open to the sky, to whatever rays leaked down through the flayed atmosphere. The girls were open to the sky and to killer whales leaping through their undefended hearts. And, anyhow, Pending Vegan had no protective partition extending from his soul. Such a thing was as imaginary as the retractable blade extending from his parents’ station wagon. What would the killer whales mean to the girls when they eventually learned the facts of the case? The injuries of the world stacked up everywhere, patiently waiting for his daughters’ attention. One day they’d find all the documentaries and Web sites on their own. You may be prone to notice your children, Renker should have warned him. “Yes, we’re all white, but we’re post-racial white.”Buy the print » Meanwhile, on the other side of the twins, a mystery: Pending Vegan’s wife. She with whom he’d once practically merged. Then, as if he’d bumped into her and knocked off two pieces, the twins had appeared. In the past year, she’d become opaque, as though deliberately to spare him. Her human outline now contained what Pending Vegan had named, in conversation with Renker, “the cloud of unknowing.” She’d ushered him into the Celexa odyssey, and abided with him through it, but what now? Was her long-deferred judgment about to fall? Emerging from Shamu Stadium, Pending Vegan felt he could withstand his wife’s judgment, as he could withstand SeaWorld, as SeaWorld could withstand itself. Neither the veterans nor the orcas nor he had wigged out and chomped or bayonetted anyone. If the orca show was the climax, the test, oughtn’t they depart? He yearned for the petty solaces of the motel, his family sorted onto twin doubles, with room-service club sandwiches, more pay-per-view Disney. “So,” he said, clapping his hands together. “Find the parking lot?” “These are all-day tickets,” his wife said. “Rebecca’s mom told us not to miss out on the pet show.” “I’m hungry,” he said. “The pet show, the pet show!” the girls chanted. “There’s food here,” his wife said crisply. “And we drove here and paid for all-day entry. The girls have waited months.” This time Pending Vegan’s wife found his eyes before he could avert, and he was enveloped in the Cloud of Unknowing. The next pet show began at one, so they parked their stroller in a shady spot and Pending Vegan went looking for something edible. He found a pizzeria, but the wait for a table was impossible, and he couldn’t imagine pushing into its dark interior even to order something to take away. Outside the restaurant, however, a man grilled turkey legs at a stand. The drumsticks looked oddly primal—this wasn’t Medieval Times, after all!—but the odor of the seared meat set Pending Vegan to slavering. See food, eat food. Sea World, Eat World. The instant he made the purchase he regretted it. The drumsticks were meat waste, discarded by some factory farm in preference for the breast product. SeaWorld might as well be selling horse’s hooves, or pickled cow eyeballs. Still, he walked it back to the stroller, feeling like Fred Flintstone. Under his wife’s incredulous gaze he tore shreds off the huge cartilaginous drumstick to feed to the girls, like a mother bird to nested fledglings. The crackling greasy skin came off whole and, once removed, was too revolting to do anything with other than discard. The girls washed the meat down with orange juice. Paper napkins stuck and tore on their faces and fingers. With fifteen minutes still to spare, they diverted to the bat-ray petting tank. As with the flamingos, Pending Vegan had to jostle the twins to the front for their chance to immerse their hands in the shallow, waist-high tank and let the blunt, rubbery rays slip beneath them. The girls gasped at the sensation. This might be what it would feel like to touch a killer whale. Here might be the true connection at last, the thing they’d really come for, and for a moment again the barriers all vanished for Pending Vegan, the turkey eyeballs forgotten, the piped-in music turned to something transporting, as if from the distant spheres. For some reason the tank full of eloquent rays also housed a horny, knuckle-faced sturgeon. A sign warned those petting the rays not to try to touch the sturgeon. Pending Vegan, in his rapture, tried to touch it. The fish’s furrowed brow seemed to want his consolation. The sturgeon in response snapped its jaws up at him where he stood amid so many merry children, his own and others. Pending Vegan jerked backward in fear. The sturgeon continued on its course, grub within the meat of the ray tank. “Did you see that?” he asked his daughters and anyone else who might bear witness. “See what?” Chloe said. “The sturgeon! It practically barked at me!” “Daddy,” Chloe said affectionately. The pet show had a stadium of its own, a smaller arena, basically a set of bleachers mounted before a stage featuring ladders, windows, obstacle courses, and giant plastic sculptures of a milk bottle and a bright-red sneaker. Unlike the seats in Shamu Stadium, those here were sparsely filled, and Pending Vegan and his wife and children found places in the third row. After only a moment the show began. In a sort of pre-credit sequence, a stream of dogs and house cats coursed out of various trapdoors over the AstroTurf stage, followed by a pig, an ostrich, and a string of ducklings, to the tune of “Who Let the Dogs Out?” The dogs jumped on a seesaw and flipped miniature plastic burgers at a fake stove. The cats climbed a rope. The twins were enthralled. One of the dogs pulled a lever to release a rolled-up banner that read, in nails-on-chalkboard font, the show’s title: “Pets Rule!” “That’s a classic example of Hitler’s Big Lie technique right there, wouldn’t you say?” Pending Vegan said. “What is?” his wife said. “ ‘Pets Rule!’ They don’t. They just . . . don’t. I hate it here.” “Sh-h-h.” “We’re complicit with a well-recognized nightmare.” “I’ve never seen any criticism of the pet show.” That’s because everyone’s too busy scrubbing their brains of aesthetic and moral calamity, he wished to say. After such knowledge, what forgiveness? Instead he said, “That sturgeon back there almost took my finger off.” “Too late, I think.” “What, for the fish to eat my finger?” “No, I mean too late for you and the fish to get on ‘60 Minutes,’ since this place already had its media moment.” An m.c. in a baseball costume and a headset microphone emerged and began introducing the pet show. Some failed actor, Pending Vegan supposed. His headshot having landed on SeaWorld’s human-resources desk, the kid was fated to deliver this obnoxious script five times daily. He described the Pet Olympics, in which the trained dogs would compete, then gave the star performers’ names as each appeared, beckoning to the children in the crowd to clap and squeal at each shameless antic. “All our dogs are rescue animals,” he explained. “They train for up to three years before making their début in ‘Pets Rule!,’ and you’re very lucky, because we have a ‘Pets Rule!’ rookie débuting today, a great little guy named Bingo. When I bring him on I want you to appreciate that he’s going in front of a crowd for the first time, so I hope you’ll give Bingo your love, give him your warmest reception—” Bingo was a Jack Russell terrier. He seemed, at first, ready for prime time, flipping over twice, then operating with his jaw a bright-red wrench on an outsized fire hydrant, resulting in a burst of water that sprayed over a bystander piglet and into the faces of the first-row spectators, who screamed in pleasure. He stood on his hind legs, grinning widely, to gobble a discreet reward from the palm of the m.c. Then the new dog bounded from the stage, scrambled over the first two rows of seats, and into Pending Vegan’s arms. There Bingo begin frantically licking and nibbling Pending Vegan’s chin and lips, with tiny sharp nips mixed in behind the swirling tongue. “Bingo!” the m.c. called from the stage. The wet piglet wandered off erratically, but chortling music continued to pour from the speakers, lending an atmosphere of hilarity. The dog now applied itself furiously to Pending Vegan’s nostrils. Whether this was part of the show or not Pending Vegan was undecided. Chloe and Deirdre responded with delight, reaching to fondle the dog that pressed their father back in his seat. His wife touched the dog, too, and Pending Vegan felt her arm graze his stomach, the first time in months. Others in their row shrank slightly away. It was their former animal, rescued once and abandoned, rescued a second time and trained, now restored to them. Bingo was Maurice, Pending Vegan understood. Like him, the dog had two names. It had recognized Pending Vegan immediately, and leaped from the stage to apologize for having abandoned their family, the man and the woman and the twin girls who were now on the outside of the wife’s body instead of the inside, where Maurice had last known them. The dog had come to honor the alpha in his former pack. With his animal cunning Maurice perceived that Pending Vegan was off the drug now. Unless that was insane. It was insane. The ostrich had ducked from behind a curtain and goose-stepped to the lip of the stage, obviously off cue. The pet show was in tatters. An ostrich was not a pet. Pending Vegan’s crimes had a life of their own, yet the dog would, in its automatic way, offer absolution, especially given hands smeared with turkey juice. Pending Vegan’s crimes screamed to the infinite horizon. Quit globalizing, said the Irving Renker in Pending Vegan’s head, as the terrier’s frantic tongue drilled into the webbing between his fingers.

The women in my wife’s family all snored, and when we visited for the holidays every winter I got no sleep. Elida’s three sisters and their bombproof husbands loved to gather at her parents’ house in Golden Valley, an inner-ring suburb of Minneapolis. The house was less than twenty years old, but the sly tricks of the contractor were evident in every sagging sill, skewed jamb, cracked plaster wall, tilted handrail, and, most significantly, in the general lack of insulation that caused the outer walls to ice up and the inside to resound. Every night the sounds were different. Helplessly cognizant, I formed mental scenarios while drifting in and out of sleep. One memorable night, I tossed and turned in a metalworking shop. From the far end of the second-floor hallway came the powerful rip of my mother-in-law’s rough-cut saw. From below, on the living room’s foldout couches, the intermittent thrum of welders’ torches—a wild hissing as the sisters’ noses sparked and soldered invisible objects. Beside me, Elida’s finishing touch: the high-pitched burr of a polisher perfecting a metal surface. Elida was slight, and she dressed in precise, quiet colors. She sat with her hands folded, wore clear nail polish and almost undetectable makeup. You would never have imagined that such a stark little person could produce such sounds. Ambien, earplugs, two pillows over my head—nothing could shut the noise out. I lay awake stewing, even though I knew I should feel sorry for them. The sisters and their mother had visited sleep clinics, endured surgery, blown their CPAPs off their faces, tried every nose strip and homeopathic remedy that existed. It wasn’t that they liked to snore but that they were incurable. I think they took comfort in solidarity, though. Elida admitted that she loved sleeping in that noisy house, and sometimes they snored in unison—which was terrifying. One subzero vacation morning, my daughter, Valery, ran her finger across the ice-furred downstairs living-room wall and asked, “What is this, Daddy?” “Snores,” I said, blue with tiredness. “All the snores from last night have stuck to the walls.” Later, after her mother and I had divorced, Valery wistfully recalled that moment as the first time she’d realized how alive with sound the night was—and that all the noise emanated from the women in the family. Later still, she asked her mother at what age she’d begun to snore, and asked me if that was the reason we’d split up. Valery was worried for her own future. I assured her that snoring had had nothing to do with the divorce, which was amicable but also unavoidably painful. I laughed and hugged Valery. I even told her that I had adored her mother’s snores. I had never adored them, but I had adored Elida, almost to the point of madness, from the first time we met. We found each other in Hollywood, as Minnesotan expatriates always do, common sense driving them together—though to leave the Land of Ten Thousand Lakes for a thirsty city built on a desert may speak of some interior flaw. For Elida, it was the compulsive lure of film editing. In my case, the shame of acting. Although I auditioned endlessly and always had work, my parts generally lasted between six and twelve seconds. I rarely had a line. But I had Elida, her intense green stare, her Nordic pallor, even after years of sunlight, her slender, gliding walk, and the dark swerve of her severe haircut. She was mine. When Valery turned twelve, I was cast in a supporting role in a movie that got a lot of attention. It could have been my fabled break. But Elida suddenly panicked over how unhappy Valery was in high school and decided that the schools in Minneapolis were more nurturing. We moved back. I had to accept the fact that my film career was over. I’d worked steadily and spoken a line or two, given many a meaningful glance, tripped villains, sucker-punched heroes, spilled coffee on or danced around movie stars in revolving doors. I had appeared in dozens of films, TV episodes, commercials. But Elida hadn’t been doing well, and both of us got better, more reliable jobs back home. Elida loved the minuscule: the hundreds of tiny decisions that together produce a great flow of scenes. She applied this love of detail to her new vocation, planning corporate events. I also loved the small, when it consisted of learning to say lines a dozen different ways, with different tonal qualities, inflections, and gestures. In my new job, as a fund-raiser for a vibrant local theatre company, I perfected the gestures and tones that I hoped would coax donations to my organization. For my birthday that year, perhaps to console me for the life I’d given up, Elida somehow managed to clip and splice together a half-hour movie of my bit parts, which she set to eerily repetitive music. Shortly after she gave me that gift, which she titled “Man of a Thousand Glimpses,” we parted. I moved out of our downtown condominium, near nurturing DeLaSalle High School. For the first couple of months after leaving Elida, I bolted out of work at exactly 4 P.M. I drove to my tiny apartment impatiently, hungrily, addicted not to a new relationship but to sleep itself. Deep rest was a drug. Waking from relaxed oblivion, I vibrated with an almost tear-inducing pleasure. Why shoot up, I wondered, when just by depriving the body of uninterrupted sleep for twenty years you can have ecstasy with no side effects? Except, it might be said, for Laurene. It took no time at all before I was sleeping the entire night beside a woman whom I feared I had married too quickly because she slept like a drunk kitten. From the beginning, I had to consciously keep myself from referring to Laurene in casual conversation as “my current wife.” Though it was taken as a joke, I knew better: it was a slip. Laurene Schotts was the daughter of the owner of an immensely successful Midwestern sporting-goods chain with outlets in the ex-est of the exurbs throughout the tristate area. She was also a lover of the theatre arts. At the annual gala dinner for my theatre company, which Elida organized pro bono the year we parted, Laurene spoke between the salad and the entrée. Her flattering words of thanks to our supporters, which screened a plea for still greater largesse, impressed me with their genuine, awkward grace. Laurene revelled in that sort of gala, where people bid on donated items—the use of time-shares in warm countries, fur coats, ski packages, signed books, hand-painted scarves. Scarves draped our chairs, and we took superb vacations. Laurene was blond, social, generous, and loved to barbecue. Elida was dark, wayward, introverted, frugal, and usually a vegetarian. Laurene could drink a whole bottle of cold Pinot Gris between 5 and 6 P.M. Elida might sip one murderous, snore-inducing glass of Côtes du Rhône between eleven and midnight. After the divorce, Elida and I met once a month to discuss Valery. We had agreed to do this early on, even when it hurt to see each other. Every time, after we had wincingly established where Valery’s college tuition would come from, or whether she needed a new therapist, after Elida had confided the latest news of Valery’s boyfriend, who we both hoped would turn out to be simply “experience,” we would conclude the hour with a cheerful goodbye, perhaps saying “That wasn’t so bad!” or even “Good to see you!” We laughed in relief. We hugged, patted each other on the back, sometimes drank a cup of tea before the drive home. We never kissed, not even on the cheek. Our divorce had been agreeable and final. Our post-divorce meetings were lingering, tedious, and self-congratulatory. Once Laurene and I were married, however, the meetings with Elida became more difficult. The boyfriend had turned into a problem—we suspected an addiction. We also began, without any warning, to fight. It would start with some obscure thing and progress to even more obscure things. By the end of our meetings, Elida and I were worn out. Then, after one particularly difficult session, still upset as we were saying goodbye, Elida, instead of hugging me, stuck out her hand. I took her hand and held onto it until she met my eyes. Her glare pulled me to her, and I shocked us both by kissing her studious, pale lips. We jumped apart, as though scorched, and turned away. We didn’t speak of it. Our next meeting was set up by e-mail, and I found myself walking eagerly toward Nick’s, a restaurant off Loring Park, which was quiet and decorous by day, with leather booths and gauzy curtains that let in glowing white rafts of winter light. Elida was sitting at the third booth in, and raised a hand as I entered, then put a tissue to her eyes. She had been crying, a rare event. It usually meant, frighteningly, that she’d had some breakthrough realization about me that she’d repressed for years. Warily, I asked her what was wrong. She told me that Valery had started snoring. Her boyfriend had left her, thank goodness, but now Valery was refusing to believe that her mother’s snoring hadn’t precipitated our divorce. “Of course it didn’t!” “Maybe not. We had other issues.” “Who doesn’t? Twenty good years. One bad year. A thousand little issues came home to roost.” “I thought, you know, because of those good years we might still get back together,” Elida said. “Until Laurene. She doesn’t snore, right?” I admitted as much. “Ah.” Elida turned to look out the window, and her dark glinting hair swung sorrowfully alongside her cheek. “The first time we spent the night together.” “St. George Street.” “I warned you I snored. I’d already been to the specialists and had surgery, which only made it worse. It’s almost a relief to sleep alone now. At least I’m not blasting a man out of bed.” “I never minded.” I thought of the couch in Los Feliz that had wrecked my back. The walk-in closet with a floor pallet in our Minneapolis condominium. I’d adjourned to these lonely sleeping venues on most nights. I did mind, but her fixed gaze shook my heart. “Last month you kissed me.” “I did.” We grew perplexed, ate in silence, each secretly examining the other’s face from time to time. I was very conscious of the drama of the situation. Any former actor would have been. Elida sussed that out. “You’re trying on expressions,” she said, laughing. “You still working on charging that phone?”Buy the print » It was true. Various expressions crossed my face, but none felt right. The elements wouldn’t meld. My eyes would express affection while my mouth was tense. Surprise would lift an eyebrow while my upper lip worked cynically. Embarrassment smote me. At least that was real. I put my face in my hands and tried to breathe, but my hands covering my mouth made me hyperventilate. When I looked up, Elida was signing the credit-card slip. She folded her napkin. “Don’t get up,” she said. “From now on, let’s do a phone call. Or e-mail.” “I really hate e-mail,” I said, “for personal stuff. Please sit down. We can solve this.” She sat down. Irrationally elated, I ordered a bottle of wine. “This is a bad idea,” Elida said. “Why? We can talk. How are the ripsaw and the welders?” Elida knew my nicknames for her mother and sisters. “Ha!” She clinked my glass. “What was I again?” “The polisher!” “I don’t really mind that,” she said. “It’s in my line of work, really. I miss you. Maybe we should have an affair where we see each other only by day and never sleep together, you know, at night.” She was speaking whimsically, but we proceeded to do exactly that. We were extremely happy for ten months. To be sure, I felt bad about lying to Laurene, but she noticed nothing. She made few demands, seemed happy enough with my company, and continued to barbecue, even in December. Meanwhile, Valery had left for college, and Elida and I were meeting in our old condominium, overlooking the poisoned brown waters of the Mississippi. Then one afternoon we were dressed, sipping tea, looking out at the river, when Valery dropped her suitcase inside the door. She was astonished to see us sitting there. She gaped silently for a moment, then clumped down the hall in her big snow boots. Elida gave me an oddly insolent look. You can live with a person, have an affair with a person, and still suddenly see an unfamiliar flash, like the belly of a fish in the shallows, there and gone. She had known exactly when our daughter would arrive home. Valery screamed when she saw the untucked covers on our bed, the scattered pillows. She clumped back into the living room. “How long has this been going on?” We told her. She began to sob. “All this time? How selfish! Mean! I could have had you both together. Instead, I’ve been trying to get used to you apart. I was facing the facts and then . . .” She pressed her mittened hands to her temples as if to keep her head from flying apart. We all started crying and, for a while, felt miserable. Then Elida snorted, and we burst into hysterical laughter. It was decided that I would come clean and leave Laurene Schotts. Elida and I would remarry. Although it was strange, the idea gave me an enormous sense of rightness. Things were falling into balance. My elation continued all the way back to Laurene’s and my house on Interlachen Boulevard, in Hopkins, facing the golf course. A beautiful stone house, with creamy painted walls, a wet bar in the basement, and a vast screening room for movie-viewing parties. Sitting in my car and looking up the flagstone walk, I thought of the pallet on the floor of the condominium’s walk-in closet. I would regret leaving this lavish, comfortable house, bought with Laurene Schotts’s money. I would regret leaving Laurene, too, the silent comfort of her presence every night. Laurene pitched a majolica vase, then a framed photograph of us in Peru. She threw a few other breakable objects at the wall and, at last, hefted a crystal unicorn she’d had since the age of ten. “You’ll regret throwing that,” I said. “Please don’t. I’m so sorry!” “Dad was right!” Tears rolled down her face onto her collar, wetting her throat. I was stricken. I couldn’t stop apologizing. Never before had I seen her truly upset or sad. “Dad was right,” she said again. “He said you were after the money. He didn’t trust you—a former bit-part actor. He begged me to make you sign a pre-nup, but I said, ‘No, you’re so wrong! He’s the one!’ ” Because I had little money, and because money hadn’t figured into my first marriage, except for the problem of not having it, I was until that moment unaware that this had even been discussed. I put it out of my mind and didn’t think about it until a month later. I had moved out of Laurene’s house into a studio apartment. I continued to see Elida only during the day. I wasn’t quite ready for the walk-in closet. “Are you crazy?” Elida said, putting down her tea cup one afternoon, after I’d told her the proposed terms of my divorce. “That family is worth more than a hundred million! You could get a settlement. They’d never even miss it.” I waved her off, but every time I thought about how handy, how fantastic it would be to have money I wavered. With my nonprofit salary, I could barely afford to soundproof Valery’s old bedroom. I told myself that I’d keep my pride and sleep on the closet floor. I’d walk away without a cent. But I didn’t, of course. We bought the condominium next door and removed two walls. This gave us an easy path into a large room, where I set up a huge screen. Before it, we arranged several couches of immense size and comfort. I slept there in grateful quiet. I didn’t take Laurene for that much, comparatively speaking, and the Schotts family was relieved. Still, they hated me enough to threaten for a while to get me fired. One night, Elida surprised me by playing the montage of clips she’d made for my birthday years earlier. It was worse, somehow, seeing it on that giant screen bought with Laurene’s money. There I was, my trivial works captured for the ages. I hadn’t noticed, when I first viewed the movie, that Elida had made of those fleeting cameos and set pieces a sort of narrative. “Man of a Thousand Glimpses” started out with crowd scenes, me here, me there, the nice-looking, unobtrusive bystander reading a newspaper, glancing up at the sound of a gunshot, the man crossing a street, exiting a bakery, jumping into his car, uncoiling a hose to water his lawn. Next, a better man appeared, somewhat older, more heroic: I ran toward a river with a child in my arms; I was a soldier dragging his buddy to safety; I lowered a dog in a basket from a burning building, addressed people through a bullhorn, rushed into waves, and dived toward despairing arms. After that, I became a good father, inflated bicycle tires, opened refrigerator doors, lay back smiling in my late-night-shopper’s easy chair, had my waist measured, drove several carloads of screaming kids to sports matches. Small wonder I then got a pounding headache, clutched my jaw, my leg, my heart, wincing in agony. Next there came a turning point, which had been much applauded at the first viewing: I smoked a cigarette in a cheap motel, a beautiful woman silhouetted in the shower behind me. Afterward, ruined, I poured myself drink after drink, ordered a third Martini, fell off a barstool, crawled under a table and licked a woman’s ankle. I sank even lower—stuck a gun in a teller’s face, took cash from the drawer of a fast-food register. I palmed an apple from a pile, stole a moped, a diamond bracelet, a newspaper. These crimes kept me tossing in bed. I stared at ceilings, my eyes luminous, hollow with glare, haunted by ghosts, by women, by hallucinations. Sleepless, I got clumsy. I was hit by a car, crushed by a falling girder, devoured by a live volcano, axed, mauled, infected with bubonic plague. I was identified several times, in liverish-green morgue light, by stricken, dignified women. It was shocking the way I just kept on dying, physically, then mentally. A wreck of a man, I leaped from a bridge, a window. I parked on train tracks and drank deeply from a flask. I smiled at the swiftly approaching lights and laughed soundlessly. The End. Elida left. I played the movie over and over. How dark was my narrative! Why had Elida killed me off, instead of letting me rescue dogs at the end? This downward trajectory gave me a moral chill. I decided that I had not only wasted my life but had acted ignobly in taking money from Laurene. Although Elida and I had made Valery happy, and I’d thought I was contented with Elida, I knew now, as I’d known before, the nature of her true feelings for me. I destroyed the movie. It would be years before anyone noticed that my long-ago birthday gift had disappeared and I was once again dispersed into the confetti of B movies, failed TV sitcoms, and clumsy commercials. No one would ever have the cruel patience to assemble my life glimpse by glimpse again. When the holidays came around, I insisted that we stay at the house in Golden Valley. Why not? I had already counted a million holes in a million ceiling tiles. The first night at Elida’s parents’ house, we all had a mirthful, loving dinner, then did the dishes together. Elida’s relatives had easily absorbed me back into the family, where my role, though peripheral, was also vital, because I was Valery’s father. After we turned in and Elida fell asleep beside me, I lay on my back waiting. It usually took her an hour or so to really get going, but her sisters and her mother had already begun. Valery and a girl cousin had sneaked a bottle of wine into their sleeping bags and were now drifting off next door. The real snoring hit with abrupt ferocity. The orderly, mechanical regularity of the metalworking shop had been abandoned. Now it was more like a pack of wolves snarling over a kill. I closed my eyes. On my mental screen I saw lions driving the wolves—or hyenas, maybe—into the veld. On a hill overlooking the bloody feast, a baboon whooped. For many hours, I elaborated on the vivid images that accompanied the soundtrack: a lioness worrying the leg off a carcass, two others fending off a male, raking his ribs with teeth and claws, while their cubs mock-fought nearby. At last, I dropped off. In the deepest part of the night, I woke. Although Elida’s snarls had calmed to the loud, gurgling purr of a big cat digesting prey meat, I came to in a sick sweat, shaking. Perhaps my imagined scenario had triggered some terror from my evolutionary past. I had dreamed that I was the hunted animal, thrown to earth, being eaten alive. The tearing of my flesh, the snap of jaws wrestling at my bones, the blissful lapping as my throat opened—all this seemed absolutely real to me. It took some time for me to understand that Elida’s body had not been satiated on mine, that she wasn’t purring because she’d swallowed my heart.

The train paused at a red light on its way into the station, waiting for a platform to clear. The passengers had put on their coats and put away their laptops and lifted their bags down from the luggage rack; some were already standing, queuing between the seats. Liverpool was the last station, the end of the two-and-a-half-hour journey from London; they were ready to move on but could not move anywhere yet. Quiet and stillness settled unexpectedly on the carriage. Because the forward motion of their lives was suspended while they waited, the passengers were suddenly more intimately present to one another—although no one spoke or made eye contact. Greta felt the change in atmosphere and looked up from her book and out the window, keeping her finger on her page. They were waiting in shadow, in a cutting between high walls of red sandstone. In the rock, she could see, like art patterns following the natural lines of the strata, the chisel marks of the navvies who’d once cut and blasted down into it. The rock face was streaked with moss, and here and there buddleia and fern had rooted, scrawny because they lived out their lives in this subterranean railway kingdom; far above, ash saplings stood out against a pale sky. The strata in the rock were woven into sections of brick wall and the old bricks—small and vivid, rust-colored, crusted with salts—seemed to flow as if they, too, had been put down in sedimentary layers. Elegantly arched recesses were built into the base of the wall. The old engineering was as magnificent in its scale and ambition as a Roman ruin, Greta thought, its ancientness inscrutable and daunting and moving. The man sitting across the table from her noticed that she was looking out. He told her that this was the oldest stretch of railway in the world, and that they used to have to haul the trains into Lime Street from here, because it was too steep for the early locomotives. “There are stables built into the rock for all the horses,” he said. “We’re inside a hill they call Mount Olive.” Greta didn’t know whether she believed him: whether he was the sort of man who knew about things or the sort who made them up. She made an interested noise, then looked back down at her book without speaking. Since her illness began, at least in the intervals when she felt well enough to read, she had immersed herself in books almost fanatically, trying not to leave open any chink in her consciousness through which she could be waylaid by awareness of her body or by fear or disgust. She read only fiction, not history or politics, and nothing experimental or difficult that would require her to pause for reflection or argument. She had read a lot of novels recently that she would have disdained in the past. As soon as she had settled into her seat at Euston, the man across the table had shown signs of wanting to talk. He had asked her how far she was going, and then whether she was travelling for business or on a holiday. Greta had answered, friendly enough, that she was going to see her daughter, Kate, who had moved to Liverpool recently. It hadn’t occurred to her at first that he might want their conversation to continue past these preliminaries. The gap between them had seemed too immense; she was almost sixty, and he was surely nearer to her daughter’s age. His rather distinctive hair was short and thick: dark blond, wavy, and wiry, with burnished gold threads in it. When he found out that Kate lived in Aigburth, he told her that he was born there, and seemed disproportionately astonished and delighted by the coincidence. Greta couldn’t hear any traces of a Liverpool accent, but he might have shed it or never had it. There was something in his eagerness to please that warned her off. His good looks reminded her of those of certain damaged film stars and pop stars from her nineteen-fifties childhood: cheekbones and jaw chiselled too rigidly, mouth loose-lipped and needy, handsome head oversized in relation to the slack, slight body. He was neatly dressed: none of Kate’s male friends would ever have chosen to wear a belted short white mac, an open-necked yellow shirt, and a maroon V-necked jumper. If Greta hadn’t heard the man speak she might have thought he was a foreigner, a Central European, dressing according to a different code. He took the mac off at some point and folded it, laying it carefully on the seat beside him, on top of a leather box-briefcase with a combination lock. You didn’t see those briefcases so often now, she realized, because everybody carried a laptop. The briefcase was old-fashioned, like his clothes. He kept telling her how much she was going to like Liverpool. It had a reputation, he said, but actually it had changed completely since the bad old days. Liverpudlians were the most warmhearted people you’d ever meet; they’d give you their last crust if you needed it. Greta thought she could hear the accent then, slipping into his speech—almost as if he were putting it on for her benefit. The only thing she didn’t like about Liverpool, she thought, was the way people who came from there harped on about how warmhearted they were. She didn’t bother to tell him that she had visited Kate once already, a year ago, just after her diagnosis. And she had lived in Liverpool for a while, too, in the seventies, with Kate’s father—who was not the man she was married to now. So she knew something about how much the city had changed. Determinedly, she opened up her book. “I can see you’re a great reader,” he said. “Yes.” “I wish I had more time for it. I used to love stories when I was a kid. Mum said the world could end while I was reading and I wouldn’t even notice.” Smiling noncommittally, she pretended to be wrapped up at once in her novel—though for a few moments the words she stared at swam in her mind, not conveying any meaning. She was too aware of her companion’s presence across the table, and of having so firmly cut off his desire to talk. He seemed at a loss as to what to do without her. He didn’t even have a newspaper with him. But Greta had to save herself, and didn’t care if he thought she was rude or cold. He didn’t show any sign of being offended. He spoke to her again from time to time—usually when, having forgotten about him, she looked up inadvertently from her reading. “How’s it going?” he asked jocularly once, nodding at her book as if it were a marathon test she’d set herself. The train stopped at Stafford, and he seemed to know all about that, too—he told her about a castle, and a battle in the Civil War. Was she imagining things, or did she detect faint traces then of a Midlands accent? He might be one of those chameleons, changing his coloration to match wherever he was. When he went to get coffee from the buffet he offered to bring one for her, too; she longed for coffee but refused, because she knew she’d feel obliged to pay for it with conversation. She would have been quite sure, once, that this man was trying to chat her up—there was a certain persistent, burrowing sweetness in his attentions. However, that was out of the question now. When Greta put on her reading glasses to look in the mirror these days, she saw that her skin was papery and sagged on her neck and under her jaw, her face was crisscrossed by tiny creases. This wasn’t all the effect of her illness; much of it was just ordinary aging. She had spent yesterday afternoon at the hairdresser’s, having her hair cut and highlighted so that she could present a cheerful, sanely coping front to Kate, but still her brown hair was full of gray. Also, Greta couldn’t help believing that her problems, which were gynecological, showed on the surface somehow, barring her definitively from the world of sexual attraction. That part of her life was over. She didn’t want to read online about women who’d had what she had and gone on to enjoy exciting sex lives for years afterward. She dreaded the smiling pretense even more than the bleak truth. When Greta wheeled her suitcase off the platform and onto the main Liverpool concourse, she expected to catch sight of Kate at once. The rush of emotion in this expectation took her by surprise: most of her feelings, over these past months, had been muted, as if she were persisting through grim effort. She anticipated with her whole body the instant when she would see Kate and they would be enfolded together; looking keenly around, she seemed to see her daughter already stepping forward—handsome, tall, spirited—out of the crowd. They weren’t the kind of mother and daughter who were always cuddling and touching, but surely they would embrace now, after everything that had happened. “Kennel changes a dog, Muffin.”Buy the print » Then she heard her phone ping and had to rummage for it in her handbag and put her glasses on to read the text. Kate would be about twenty minutes late—no hint of regret or apology. And Greta knew Kate: twenty minutes meant half an hour, at least. Her disappointment as she read was infantile. What did it matter if Kate was a bit late? But the idea of her daughter’s waiting for her had seemed for a moment like a rich gift of the good luck she had got used to doing without. She had been trying so sedulously not to want anything too much. Quickly she wiped her eyes with a tissue from her sleeve. Nothing had gone wrong; everything was still on track. She could use the time to get herself the coffee she had wanted earlier. Wheeling her suitcase over to one of the café franchises in the station, she didn’t see until the last minute that her companion from the train was there ahead of her, sitting at a table out on the concourse, beside the dark little den where the coffee was made. He hadn’t seen her, either: he was bending his head over his coffee, blowing on it to cool it. At least she couldn’t accuse him of stalking her; it looked now, if anything, as if she were in pursuit of him. Away from the train, with his mac on and a paisley silk scarf tied around his neck, he didn’t seem quite so unfortunate; there was even something touchingly contained and self-sufficient in the way he sat absorbed in the steam from his cup, not texting or talking on his phone, no phone in evidence at all. His skin was rough and pitted, but the slanting lines and planes of his cheekbones were striking in profile, beautiful like those of a peasant in an old Central European photograph, though Greta thought he didn’t know it. When he did notice her—a wheel on her suitcase got caught on the leg of one of the wrought-iron café chairs, scraping it along the floor—he put down his cup with what appeared to be genuine pleasure at seeing her again. Concerned, he asked if everything was all right. Probably her nose was flushed red—that was usually what happened when she cried. She explained brightly that her daughter had been delayed, and she’d decided to have a coffee while she waited. On an impulse, she paused beside his table. “Do you mind if I sit here?” He leaped to pull out a chair for her. “Be my guest.” This time, Greta allowed him to buy her a coffee, a cappuccino; he went to queue for it at the counter inside. Actually, she was grateful; she needed to sit down. She wasn’t in pain, exactly: there was only the deep ache where her womb once was, and a familiar draining sensation as if her blood were waves, dragging at the gravel on a shore. There was no need to hold herself so carefully apart from this stranger, she thought, just because he was needy and lonely. She was needy, too. They might as well keep each other company. He was keen to talk about himself, when Greta encouraged him. He had come to Liverpool to visit relatives who lived in Blundell Sands, but they wouldn’t be home from work yet so he was in no hurry; he would have a little look around before he caught the bus. He had only a small suitcase with him, she saw, along with the briefcase. These relatives weren’t his own age; they were his mother’s cousins. Greta began to guess that he was one of those people who spent their youth involved with an older generation, until they themselves became elderly by association—and didn’t mind it in the least or try to escape. This would explain his clothes, and something quaint and dated in his manner. She could imagine him as the cherished boy in a strong extended family, which for no particular reason hadn’t produced many children. Such a good, obedient boy, and so nice-looking: they would be bemused by the fact that he didn’t have more friends his own age, or a girlfriend. Greta inquired about girlfriends and he reddened, said he was afraid not, not at present. He might be gay: she had already wondered about that. He worked for his uncle, who managed a small wholesaler’s in Brentford, supplying foil containers and other utensils to the food trade. The Liverpool relatives had invited him to stay because he needed a change of scene: he was still getting over the shock of his mother’s death, six months ago. He and his mother had been very close, he said; he had lived at home to keep her company after his father died. It was easy to assume that families like this didn’t exist anymore: submissive, frugal, unpolitical, tribal. Greta knew for certain, as though she’d seen it, that last night he had laid out his clothes for the journey, along with his train ticket, just as his mother would have done for him when she was alive, and that he had checked several times to be sure he hadn’t forgotten anything. This was the world of Greta’s childhood, which she had rejected so absolutely. She knew that the tragic story of his mother’s visits to the G.P., her misdiagnosis, and her falling down unconscious in the street while she was shopping must have been recounted many times: it was as well-worn as the track of footsteps around an old carpet. You could feel the reality collapsing into the familiar safe phrases, becoming part of a routine, becoming myth: “The nurses in the hospital were very kind. They did everything they could. She looked very peaceful when they laid her out.” Then Greta lifted her head and saw Kate in the distance. “Ah, here’s my daughter!” she cried, triumphant, interrupting him, half standing up from the table to wave to Kate. She knew it was unseemly of her to abandon him like that mid-sentence: he was telling her something so intimate and so important to him, and she had encouraged him to tell her these things, had skillfully probed for them. Kate was wearing silky loose trousers, a cropped top tight across her breasts, showing her bare midriff, and some kind of military-style coat with yellow frogging, hanging open. She was the very opposite type to Greta’s new friend, not in the least meek or old-fashioned. The long rope of her hair, worn in a ponytail high on her head, was red by nature, dyed with streaks of a wilder red. Catching sight of Greta, she strode across the concourse toward her, impatient as if she weren’t the one who was late. “I don’t have the car,” she announced, only glancing disparagingly at her mother’s companion. “Boyd needed it today. We have to get a taxi.” Kate always had an air of submitting to her mother’s kisses, rather than returning them: her quickly proffered cheek tasted of moisturizer, the skin so clear. There was hardly time for Greta to say goodbye to the young man, and they parted as if it were the merest accident that they’d been sitting at the same table. She hadn’t properly looked at him again, once she’d seen Kate. And yet, while she was smiling proudly, watching Kate make her way toward them, he had said something fairly astonishing—so quickly, and with such an air of its being an acceptable and reasonable suggestion, that Greta wasn’t sure at first that she’d heard correctly. Then she didn’t have time to respond before Kate was there, taking charge. He’d said that he would be at the Palm House, in Sefton Park, on Thursday afternoon, at two o’clock. If she wanted, she could meet him there. When Greta lived in Liverpool, in the seventies, with her first husband, before Kate was born—in fact the very summer Kate was conceived—she wasn’t called Greta. Her name then was Margaret: Maggie. And Ian, Kate’s father, wasn’t strictly Greta’s husband, either, not by law. It was while they were staying with friends in that squat in Liverpool that they had devised their own marriage ceremony. Under the sign of the moon and the eye of the goddess, it began. With my body I thee worship. It was difficult to know, with Ian, just how much irony there was in this. He could be pretty mocking about phony mysticism. He knew about the real pagans, he said: he had read classics at York University, which was where he and Greta had met, though Ian had dropped out halfway through their second year. And he had a way of inciting other people to behave extravagantly, then looking on with gleeful amusement, as if he couldn’t believe how biddable they were. Ian and Greta made little cuts on their thumbs in front of their friends in the squat, and mingled bloods, and ate their food from the same dish. He was smaller than she was, very skinny and lithe and excitable, always jumping about like a kid, with a silky beard and very pale skin and the same silky auburn hair as Kate’s. Sometimes he was exquisitely kind to Greta—especially in sex, but not only then. He loved it when she absorbed herself in his crazes, for planting things or baking bread or Hungarian folk music; they had talked seriously about moving to Wales together, to try subsistence farming. She had learned never to relax her guard, though. He could snatch his favor away from one moment to the next, retreating into a dark mood, leaving her bereft. “So this is what you do when I pretend to leave, then come back unexpectedly in five minutes.”Buy the print » Ian dropped acid for the first time on their wedding day, along with a gang of their friends. Greta was too afraid to try it, but said she would stay with the others to watch out for them. They went wandering around the streets at night, exclaiming over all the ordinary sights: telephone boxes and cars and garden shrubs. All natural things were beautiful; everything man-made seemed monstrous. Ian announced that he could see into the atomic structure of the paving stones under their feet, which was like a fluorescent grid of energy: he could have sunk through it if he’d wanted, but he consented to the laws of physics, allowing it to hold him up. They climbed over a fence into a park—it might have been Sefton Park—and headed for the open grassy slopes, where they lay on their backs looking up at the sky. Some of the boys built a fire out of fallen branches and stood talking to it. “Brother fire, we won’t hurt you,” they said. They found it funny and profound when someone asked whether the fire was heating them or they were heating the fire. Then Ian wanted Greta to consummate the marriage with him there on the grass, in honor of the moon goddess: except that there wasn’t a moon, the night was cloudy, and the grass was wet. Obviously they had had sex many times before—but he insisted that this time was sacred. Greta said that she couldn’t, because of the others being there. “Don’t be afraid,” he said, coaxing her, lying half on top of her, rubbing her breast with his palm, covering her neck with little nibbling kisses. “Trust me: Margaret, Maggie, Marguerite. It will be different, because we’re man and wife. It will be amazing. Don’t be uptight, don’t be bourgeois.” He often teased her for being bourgeois. His own family was far nastier than Greta’s—his father was a bully, who worked for the BBC, and his mother was an actress and an alcoholic. But perhaps it was worse to be safe and dull. Their lovemaking would be beautiful for everyone to see, he told her. “Knock knock, open up.” “How come your title doesn’t change,” Greta said, “and mine does? You’re still man, but I’m wife? Why don’t you call yourself husband?” Her feminism in those days consisted mostly of these niggling technicalities. Usually Ian tolerated them, as if they were of no importance. Now he stopped kissing her but stayed on top of her, his hand still on her breast; his breath on her cheek smelled sour. He was looking through the dark into her face—not at it but into it. Up to that point she had wondered whether the tab of acid was really having any effect on him, because he had sounded too much like himself, putting on what he imagined tripping ought to be like. “I can see into your thoughts,” he said. “I can see them pulsing. I can see the little petty, sulky worms of your thoughts, eating you up because you’re dead. Poor little Maggie, everyone. So pretty, isn’t she? But I found out she’s dead.” For a moment, Greta seemed to see what Ian saw, as if she were looking down at herself. The whole sum of her being had a kind of corpse-luminescence in the darkness: stiff and mechanical, inhibited. Because of her background, or perhaps just because of her intrinsic nature, there were certain levels of experience she would never be able to attain; she would never break out of the bounds of her reasonable self. Then she pushed him away and sat up and was upset and angry, and he ignored her, cutting her out of conversations as if she weren’t there. The others all seemed by now to have passed into a world she couldn’t enter. Eventually she left them to it and made her way back to the squat; she spent her wedding night alone, sobbing and desolate, worrying that something terrible would happen because she’d abandoned them. Nothing terrible did happen—although the police turned up in the park, because of the fire, and chased them out. And she did find out, weeks later, that after she left Ian had made love on the grass anyway, with a girl called Carol, whom they hardly knew: a friend of a friend, passing through the squat. Greta had wondered why Carol left so precipitously the next day. When she confronted Ian, he asked if she thought she owned his body, just because she was married to him. “We’re not going to do any of that crap,” he said. “And, by the way, that trippy sex was amazing—like fucking the universe, for eternity. You should try it sometime. Honestly.” Greta sometimes told stories about Ian to her second husband—the real one, Graham, who came later. Reliably, Graham would be outraged by Ian’s arrogance and swaggering selfishness. Whenever the two men crossed paths—Ian would take a fancy, every so often, to being involved in his daughter’s upbringing—Ian could be counted on to turn up hours late, to feed Kate the sweets that made her hyper, and to keep her up long past her bedtime, so that she had a sick headache the next day. He condescended with amusement to Greta and Graham’s domestic routines. Greta, by this time, was an English teacher at a comprehensive school, and Graham worked with disaffected teen-agers. Ian never settled down to anything so steady; for a while, he had a business buying old pine furniture and stripping it. It didn’t help that when Kate was little she adored her father, who forgot about her for months at a time: it was Graham who pushed her on the swings in the playground, packed her little bag for nursery school, got up with her at night when she had bad dreams. There was something not quite honest, Greta knew, in the way she prodded Graham to say those dismissive and loathing things about Ian. Partly, it smoothed out certain tricky passages in their relationship, made Graham her defender. Otherwise, he might have wondered how much she still yearned, treacherously, for Ian—because there were aspects of the stories about Ian that she withheld. When he told her, for instance, about the “trippy sex,” Greta had actually laughed, because she knew that he had chosen the word “trippy” deliberately to flaunt at her, with its plastic, blaring garishness, calculated to make her curl up. Fucking the universe for eternity, really? He couldn’t mean it, not in those preposterous words. And when she’d laughed, Ian had laughed, too, and their quarrel had finished, as usual, in vengeful, untender lovemaking, the two of them gripping hard, staring shamelessly, right to the bitter end, or almost to the end. “Look at you,” Ian had said with amazement. “Just look at you.” Ian died when Kate was nine, knocked off his bike by a lorry in London. And these days she didn’t want to hear anything about him; she called Graham “Dad,” which she had refused to do when she was a child. In the taxi from the station, she chattered insistently, and Greta knew that it was because she was afraid of hearing about her mother’s illness. Greta would find that they’d made a few changes in the flat, Kate said. They’d bought a new sofa, and because they couldn’t afford a new kitchen they’d painted the cupboard doors a different color. Greta guessed that Kate was vaguely aggrieved about the new kitchen—her sense of her entitlement to material things was somehow not greedy, just part of her natural force. She and Boyd were doing well at the university: the department had won an important research grant, which would fund their fellowships for at least three more years. Boyd and Kate both worked in Ocean Sciences, Boyd on the carbon cycle, Kate on fish stocks. Greta sat forward to look out the taxi window, trying to spot landmarks from the seventies. “I remember once it was dusk,” she said, “and we were in a car. I don’t know whose car—Ian didn’t own one. And the road ran around in front of a great circle of Victorian buildings, so tall they blocked out the sky—so many windows. Huge hotels, perhaps, railway hotels. Then we realized these buildings were empty shells, half-ruined—you could see right through them in places. Like being in ancient Rome after the fall of the empire.” The whole idea of her mother’s past made Kate uneasy. “Who was that creepy guy you were with at the station?” she asked suspiciously. “You were chatting merrily away together.” Greta was practiced at presenting a face wiped clean of knowledge. “Just someone who was sitting there when I sat down,” she said. “There weren’t any empty tables.” “Yes, there were.” It wasn’t until Greta’s suitcase had been unloaded onto the pavement in front of Kate’s flat that Kate asked about her health, hastily, as if in passing. The flat was a recent conversion, in a detached house in a wide street planted with hornbeams, where a few houses were still crazily derelict. “So what do the doctors say? Are they pleased with you?” Greta was paying the driver. She didn’t mind that Kate always asked like this, appealing above her head to the doctors, as if her mother couldn’t be trusted to understand her own disease; it was only Kate’s way of channelling her emotions. Greta said she thought the doctors were pleased: they didn’t want to see her for three months. This was the truth, although she pronounced it with an air of blessed reprieve that wasn’t exactly what she felt. Her expectations lately were so muffled and diminished, and there was too much that could happen in three months. Inside the flat, Kate solicitously made Greta comfortable on the new sofa, put the kettle on for tea; she had bought almond cakes from an organic place Boyd approved of. Kate could forgive her mother for being ill, now that she was allowed not to dread the worst—she could even forgive her for not wanting cake. “You have to eat, you know,” Kate said. “You’re horribly thin. It doesn’t suit you.” “Aren’t they killing you?”Buy the print » Greta closed her eyes, giving herself up to the kettle’s roaring undertow, the thud and rattle of the fridge door closing, the chiming of a spoon against china mugs, Kate’s low humming to herself, the central-heating radiators coming to life, clicking and easing. Greta’s awareness of her daughter’s coming and going was like a thick thread of feeling, connecting them materially. In these past months, her mind would quite often submerge like this in her surroundings. This is all there is, she’d think—being alive, just here, right now. It wasn’t a reductive or depressing insight; it was almost a form of happiness, the kind of apprehension religious people strove for. Away from Boyd, Greta could find herself resenting him; you might have thought he was a tyrant, from Kate’s anxious attention to his opinions and judgments. He wouldn’t touch alcohol; he liked only European jazz; because of climate change, he refused to fly. But Greta and Graham had scrutinized him with deep suspicion and had to conclude that it was Kate who made the tyranny, for her own purposes—she who had never submitted to anyone before. And, if it was tyranny, then she was thriving on it, blooming and softened and eager in his presence. Boyd arrived home, the first evening of Greta’s stay, laden with bags full of meat and vegetables from the farmers’ market he’d visited in the morning; he cooked a stir-fry, which was just the thing to appeal to Greta’s appetite. And, as soon as he was actually present, Greta remembered how much she liked him: fair and trim and rosy, light on his feet, with a neat round head and a bald patch like a monk’s tonsure. His fleecy clothes in primary colors were no doubt scientifically designed to keep him warm, or cool, or whatever it was he wanted. He was much better than Kate at asking sensibly how Greta was, and then not making a big deal of it but drawing her into more general conversation, doing her the courtesy of presuming that she was still interested in things. Boyd was definitely the kind of man who knew things. He had strong opinions, but they were always worth listening to. When Kate held forth about the degradation of the oceans she was indignant, as if it were everyone’s fault but hers; Boyd was more measured and realistic. Sometimes Greta even thought he colluded with her in amusement—which Kate didn’t notice—at Kate’s passionate partisanship. And no doubt his responses to Greta, when she didn’t know things or muddled her ideas, were tinged with the same, not ungenerous humor. The life Kate and Boyd led wasn’t anything like Greta’s life had been, when she was in her thirties. For instance, Greta and Graham would have chosen to live on this street precisely because of its mixture of renovated houses with derelict ones. They’d liked to feel that they were living on the edge of something “real,” not retreating too far inside the safety of privilege; whereas, Boyd explained to Greta, unapologetically, that he and Kate saw this flat as a transitional step on their way to buying a house in a nicer area. And yet this younger couple were more likely to effect radical change in the world, for the good, through their work, than she and Graham ever had been. Their certainty and their energy warmed her—even if she couldn’t quite suppress her habit of critical observation. Boyd was comical, sorting the recycling with such earnest pedantry. And Greta enjoyed noticing that he had a weakness for sweet things—after he’d eaten his own almond cake, he finished the one that she had hardly touched. She asked him about the cutting where her train had waited outside the station. Was it true that it was the oldest railway in the world? Someone had told her it was. Boyd thought it might be—the oldest passenger railway, at least. And, yes, they really had once hauled the trains up the last steep stretch into Lime Street station, because the old locomotives weren’t strong enough. But Boyd was skeptical when she mentioned stables. Horses would never have been strong enough to pull an entire train uphill. No, he thought that there had been some kind of pulley system—wagons laden with ballast going down, pulling up the coaches full of people. The evening began to be filled with their interest. Boyd looked things up on the Internet and read them out to Greta, about the building of the railways and the hard lives of the navvies. He was more or less right, it turned out, about the pulley system; Greta wondered whether she’d misunderstood the man on the train, who had mentioned horses, or whether he’d made a mistake. Kate didn’t care about the railways, but she was happy because Boyd wasn’t bored; he was enjoying himself. That night Greta dreamed that she was at the Palm House in Sefton Park—although this wasn’t a place she remembered ever having visited in her real life. Her idea of it had obviously got mixed up with the memory of those Victorian hotels in their ruined grandeur; the high walls of the Palm House were precarious and toppling, and inside it was wildly overgrown with the exotic plants that must once have been cultivated there. In her dream, she was pushing through thick foliage—brittle, dusty leaves and clinging creepers and intricately fleshy blooms. And she was aware of someone else moving around nearby, rattling the spiky, dark-green leaves, grunting with puzzled and exasperated effort: at any moment they might come face to face. Then she must have wandered out somehow without meaning to. From outside, the Palm House looked more like a glasshouse, crazily dilapidated, its iron frame rusty and festooned with some kind of municipal tape, perhaps meant as a safety warning. A solid mass of plant growth pressed against the steamed-up glass inside and pushed out through broken panes. Dark figures seemed to be standing around the perimeter of the building at intervals, facing outward as if they were on guard. Greta woke up then, and opened her eyes in the pitch dark. She was on the sofa bed in Kate and Boyd’s spare room, which was also their study: lying on her back, which always made her snore. Probably that accounted for the grunting and the exasperated efforts. Kate had managed to free up some time to spend with her mother, but on the Thursday, as it happened, she needed to go in to work. Greta reassured her that she would be happy spending the day by herself. She would go out for coffee to that friendly place nearby where Kate had taken her. And if the weather was fine she might manage a stroll in the park afterward. On Thursday morning, when Boyd and Kate had gone and she was alone in the flat, Greta took a long time getting ready. She knew she had to pace herself, for these efforts; when she took a bath, she was careful not to wet her hair, which still looked all right from the hairdresser’s, because washing and drying it would use up too much of her strength. Then she put on the nicest outfit she had brought with her: a dark-navy cord skirt and red wool shirt and navy cashmere jumper. She even got out Kate’s ironing board and pressed the skirt, which was creased from her suitcase. Sitting at the mirror in Kate’s bedroom, she made up her face, beginning with moisturizer, then putting on a very light foundation—which she never used to wear but thought she needed now, to make herself presentable. It seemed significant, but not unbearable, to be confronting her own worn-out face with such purposeful attention—pulling it into the old grimaces, creaming and painting and smudging with her fingertip—in the mirror that usually reflected Kate. In Greta’s imagination Kate’s youthful looks were somehow balanced against hers, redeeming them. Not that Kate wasted much time staring at her reflection. Her beautifying was still lordly and dismissive: fastening the long tail of her hair in a few quick movements, tugging earrings hastily into her piercings, stooping to the mirror to draw thickly with black eyeliner along her lids, finishing with that bold upward stroke. Kate could have gone naked into the street and been lovely. The place Greta went for coffee was around the corner from the flat, in a row of independent restaurants and small shops selling home-baked bread and local pottery. A converted chapel offered Pilates and art classes, and Sefton Park was beyond that, at the end of the road. Greta bought a copy of The Guardian and found herself a corner by a warm radiator in the shabby red-and-yellow-painted café-bar. “It’s a hippie place, Mum,” Kate had said. “Just your kind of thing.” Students were working on laptops; a couple of men probably Greta’s age, with flaring drinkers’ faces, were on to pints already, at the bar. Young mothers had escaped from home to gossip with their friends, steering their bulky pushchairs in beside the tables. There was plenty of room—no one would mind if Greta took her time over her coffee. It was a relief to be away from Graham for a while, she thought, though the thought wasn’t drastic or hostile: she never wavered, these days, in her appreciation of his kindness. When she looked at her watch at quarter to two, she decided to buy herself a second cup of coffee; then, on impulse, at the bar she asked for a glass of Pinot Grigio instead, though that was risky in the middle of the day. She was wary of alcohol, in her weakened state. “What if we’re just a ship in somebody’s bottle? Yar, here comes me existential crisis.”Buy the print » Although it was very ordinary wine—Graham would have refused to drink it—the cold green taste of each mouthful was heady and transforming, worth whatever it would cost her afterward. She began to feel liberated and exhilarated, just as she might have felt when she was twenty. It occurred to her—but very calmly, the way you might describe a limb getting over an attack of pins and needles—that she was coming back to life. And yet all her attention was focussed on what was in the newspaper, not on herself. She understood that her own experience was a tiny atom beside the cold, hard masses of history and politics, full of cruel truths. Boyd had read to her, the other night, about the men who had died cutting or tunnelling through the rock to build those early railways: killed in explosions or by runaway wagons, or crushed by falling stones, or by the buckets that carried the stone—and the men—up and down in the shafts. Twenty-six were killed, to make one tunnel. She didn’t look at her watch again until two-twenty: it was surely too late now, for any meeting in the Palm House. Then, glancing out the café window, she actually saw the young man from the train walking purposefully along the street, away from the park. So he had turned up; Greta had begun not to believe in the meeting, thinking she must have misheard him. This proof of his independent, real existence was dismaying, because he’d come to seem a figment of her fantasy: in her memory, she had smoothed him out, forgetting that in his looks there was something unsettling and blatant—the thick lashes and coarse skin and big, sensuous mouth were in excess of any personality he’d shown her. His expression was intent and preoccupied; he wore his white mac and was still carrying his briefcase, and she was jolted by a pang of guilt for his loneliness. As he passed close by the café window, she tapped on the glass to attract his attention. Looking around, he was startled and forlorn. She had caught him out in his desolation: they were strangers to each other; he might even be angry with her because she’d let him down. Smiling, placatory, Greta beckoned him inside. As soon as he recognized her, she saw him smother the raw truth she’d glimpsed, preparing his bright face for her approval like a good boy. While he made his way toward her—rattling at the wrong door first, which didn’t open—she was already regretting the loss of her solitude. He looked out of place in the hippie bar: he had even put on a tie under the maroon jumper, perhaps in her honor. She wanted to buy him a drink in return for the coffee at the station, but he insisted that he’d never let a lady pay for anything, and it wasn’t worth arguing with him. He bought himself a Coke, and got her another glass of wine, though she’d said she didn’t want one, and really didn’t. Still, once the wine was in front of her she couldn’t help taking swallows of it, just to ease the awkwardness of the situation. He didn’t mention that she hadn’t turned up to meet him. In fact, he said he was so glad she’d come, as if the bar had been their plan all along; counting his change carefully, he put it away in a little purse in the pocket of his mac. “I knew you were an easy person to get on with,” he said. “As soon as I saw you.” “I’m not really very easy. You don’t know me at all.” He insisted that he was a good judge of people, he could always tell. Then they exchanged names: he was Mitchell, and she explained that she was Greta, short for Margaret. Astonished and delighted, he said that Margaret was his mother’s name. “You see, it’s funny because I had this feeling, before you even told me. I just knew what you were going to say.” Greta wasn’t sure that she believed in this coincidence, although it would be a strange thing for him to lie about. She remembered the impression she’d had on the train, that he was a chameleon making himself up to fit into any circumstances—to please her, or so that he could appear competent and connected. The wine was making her dizzy. “Kate’s father persuaded me to change my name to Greta,” she said. “Even before Mrs. Thatcher, he hated Margaret.” “Are you divorced?” She explained that Ian had died in an accident, long ago. “Though we weren’t together by then, anyway. And I’ve been married for years to someone else.” “But I suppose Kate’s father was the love of your life.” Greta was aware of laughing too loudly, and thought people were looking at them. They might imagine that Mitchell was her son or her nephew. Or they might detect something fervid and artificial in her reactions to him, and wonder whether he was a con man tricking her out of her money, or a gigolo she was paying for. She said she didn’t believe in that kind of love. It turned out that Mitchell believed not only in true love but also in destiny. Certain individuals were fated to be together. Everything that happened had its purpose, he said, even if we couldn’t see it. Yet, all the time he was setting out these platitudes with such solemnity, Greta felt sure that they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own skeptical, condescending cleverness, when she argued with him, wasn’t the real content of her thoughts, either. This conversation took place on the surface, while their real lives were hidden underground beneath it, crouching, listening out, mutely attentive. Mitchell’s physical reality was like a third presence at the table: his bitten skin and slanted, suffering cheekbones. “I brought something for you,” he said. “It’s a present.” Greta protested anxiously that she didn’t want any present, but he ignored her and twiddled with the combination lock on his briefcase, then lifted the lid importantly and took out a thick paperback book, well-read, its pages furry with use. Judging by the cover illustration and the title in embossed gold letters, it was the kind of historical novel Greta wouldn’t dream of reading: a gritty, working-class romance, all arrogant mill owners and salt-of-the-earth girls in shawls and clogs. “I don’t want it,” she said. “I hardly know you.” “Please. I want you to have it. I know you’ll enjoy it.” Thrusting the book at her, he managed somehow to knock over his drink; sticky Coke ran down the edge of the table and onto her skirt, though she shoved herself smartly backward in her chair. She had thought he was just drinking Coke, but she could smell now that there was alcohol in it, too, something sweet and strong—rum, perhaps. “Oh, Jesus!” Mitchell said. “Jesus, I’m so sorry.” “It doesn’t matter. Don’t make a fuss.” While Greta rummaged for a packet of tissues in her handbag, Mitchell ran to the bar for paper napkins. When he came back he knelt on the floor in front of her, dabbing at the wet patch on her skirt. “Will the stain come out?” he said. “Don’t fuss. It’s nothing, honestly. It won’t stain.” Their table was in a little nook beside the window, so that he wasn’t easily visible to the other customers. Suddenly he dropped his head into her lap, face down between her thighs. It was so unexpected, and his head weighed so heavily, that at first Greta thought he must have passed out. She could feel the heat of his breath through the wet cloth. She pushed at his head, not liking the feel of the coarse wire of his hair in her hands. “Get off me,” she said urgently and quietly, not wanting to draw anyone’s attention. “Get up right now.” He lifted his head and looked at her blearily, as if he hardly saw her, as if she’d roused him out of sleep. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.” “You’d better go. You’re making a spectacle of yourself.” Obediently, he got to his feet then, and he grabbed at his mac and briefcase and headed to the wrong door again, tugging desperately at the handle. Greta wouldn’t look up to see him go; she was burning with humiliation, exposed to all the customers in the café. He had left his book on the table and she opened it, just so that she didn’t have to see whether anyone was watching. A business card was tucked inside the front cover, with Mitchell’s name printed on it, and the name of the company he worked for. His phone number was circled in Biro. And there, written on the flyleaf of the book, was her name. “To Margaret,” it said. “With love.” Greta was confused, and for one long moment she really believed that it was fated, that this stranger had known her before he ever met her, and that he had written her name inside his book before she even told him what it was.

Katie wanted to relive Katie at nine, before her mother left, and I could appreciate that, but we had only one console at the time, and I really didn’t want to go there. It was coming up on the holidays, absolutely grim outside, nine-thirty at night—on a school night—and she had to be up at six to catch the bus in the dark. She’d already missed too much school, staying home on any pretext and reliving all day, while I was at work, so there really were no limits, and who was being a bad father here? A single father unable to discipline his fifteen-year-old daughter, let alone inculcate a work ethic in her? Me. I was. And I felt bad about it. I wanted to put my foot down and at the same time give her something, make a concession, a peace offering. But, even more, I wanted the box myself, wanted it so baldly it was showing in my face, I’m sure, and she needed to get ready for school, needed sleep, needed to stop reliving and worry about the now, the now and the future. “Why don’t you wait till the weekend?” I said. She was wearing those tights which all the girls wear like painted-on skin, standing in the doorway to the living room, perching on one foot the way she did when she was doing her dance exercises. Her face belonged to her mother, my ex, Christine, who hadn’t been there for her for six years and counting. “I want to relive now,” she said, diminishing her voice to a shaky, hesitant plaint that was calculated to make me give in to whatever she wanted, but it wasn’t going to work this time, no way. She was going to bed, and I was going back to a rainy February night in 1982, a sold-out show at the Roxy, a band I loved then, and the girl I was mad crazy for before she broke my heart and Christine came along to break it all over again. “Why don’t you go upstairs and text your friends or something?” I said. “I don’t want to text my friends. I want to be with my mom.” This was a plaint, too, and it cut even deeper. She was deprived, that was the theme here, and my behavior, as any impartial observer could have seen in a heartbeat, verged on child abuse. “I know, honey, I know. But it’s not healthy. You’re spending too much time there.” “You’re just selfish, that’s all,” she said, and here was the shift to a new tone, a tone of animus and opposition, the subtext being that I never thought of anybody but myself. “You want to, what, relive when you were, like, my age or something? Let me guess: you’re going to go back and relive yourself doing homework, right? As an example for your daughter?” The room was a mess. The next day was the day the maid came, so I was standing amid the debris of the past week, a healthy percentage of it—abandoned sweat socks, energy-drink cans, crumpled foil pouches that had once contained biscotti, popcorn, or Salami Bites—generated by the child standing there before me. “I don’t like your sarcasm,” I said. Her face was pinched so that her lips were reduced to the smallest little O-ring of disgust. “What do you like?” “A clean house. A little peace and quiet. Some privacy, for Christ’s sake—is that too much to ask?” “I want to be with Mom.” “Go text your friends.” “I don’t have any friends.” “Make some.” And this, thrown over her shoulder, preparatory to the furious pounding retreat up the stairs and the slamming of her bedroom door: “You’re a pig!” And my response, which had been ritualized ever since I’d sprung for the five-thousand-dollar, second-generation Halcom X1520 Relive Box with the In-Flesh Retinal Projection Stream and altered forever the dynamic between me and my only child: “I know.” Most people, when they got their first Relive Box, went straight for sex, which was only natural. In fact, it was a selling point in the TV ads, which featured shimmering adolescents walking hand in hand along a generic strip of beach or leaning in for a tender kiss over the ball return at the bowling alley. Who wouldn’t want to go back there? Who wouldn’t want to relive innocence, the nascent stirrings of love and desire, or the first time you removed her clothes and she removed yours? What of girlfriends (or boyfriends, as the case may be), wives, ex-wives, one-night stands, the casual encounter that got you halfway there, then flitted out of reach on the wings of an unfulfilled promise? I was no different. The sex part of it obsessed me through those first couple of months, and if I drifted into work each morning feeling drained (and not just figuratively) at least I knew that it was a problem, that it was adversely affecting my job performance, and, if I didn’t cut back, threatening my job itself. Still, to relive Christine when we first met, to relive her in bed, in candlelight, clinging fast to me and whispering my name in the throes of her passion, was too great a temptation. Or even just sitting there across from me in the Moroccan restaurant where I took her for our first date, her eyes like portals, as she leaned into the table and drank up every word and witticism that came out of my mouth. Or to go farther back, before my wife entered the picture, to Rennie Porter, the girl I took to the senior prom and spent two delicious hours rubbing up against in the back seat of my father’s Buick Regal—every second of which I’d relived six or seven times now. And to Lisa, Lisa Denardo, the girl I met that night at the Roxy, hoping I was going to score. I started coming in late to work. Giving everybody, even my boss, the zombie stare. I got my first warning. Then my second. And my boss—Kevin Moos, a decent enough guy, five years younger than me, who didn’t have an X1520, or not that he was letting on—sat me down in his office and told me, in no uncertain terms, that there wouldn’t be a third. But it was a miserable night, and I was depressed. And bored. So bored you could have drilled holes in the back of my head and taken core samples and I wouldn’t have known the difference. I’d already denied my daughter, who was thumping around upstairs with the cumulative weight of ten daughters, and the next day was Friday, T.G.I.F., end of the week, the slimmest of workdays, when just about everybody alive thinks about slipping out early. I figured that even if I did relive for more than the two hours I was going to strictly limit myself to, even if I woke up exhausted, I could always find a way to make it to lunch and just let things coast after that. So I went into the kitchen and fixed myself a gin-and-tonic, because that was what I’d been drinking that night at the Roxy, and carried it into the room at the end of the hall that had once been a bedroom and was now (Katie’s joke, not mine) the reliving room. The console sat squarely on the low table that was the only piece of furniture in the room, aside from the straight-backed chair I’d set in front of it the day I brought the thing home. It wasn’t much bigger than the gaming consoles I’d had to make do with in the old days, a slick black metal cube with a single recessed glass slit running across the face of it from one side to the other. It activated the minute I took my seat. “Hello, Wes,” it said, in the voice I’d selected, male, with the slightest bump of an accent to make it seem less synthetic. “Welcome back.” I lifted the drink to my lips to steady myself—think of a conductor raising his baton—and cleared my throat. “February 28, 1982,” I said. “9:45 P.M. Play.” The box flashed the date and time and then suddenly I was there, the club exploding into life like a comet touching down, light and noise and movement obliterating the now, the house gone, my daughter gone, the world of getting and doing and bosses and work vanished in an instant. I was standing at the bar with my best friend, Zach Ronalds, who turned up his shirt collars and wore his hair in a Joe Strummer pompadour just like me, only his hair was black and mine choirboy blond (I’d dye it within the week), and I was trying to get the bartender’s attention so I could order us G.-and-T.s with my fake I.D. The band, more New Wave than punk, hadn’t started yet, and the only thing to look at onstage was the opening band, whose members were packing up their equipment while hypervigilant girls in vampire makeup and torn fish-net stockings washed around them in a human tide that ebbed and flowed on the waves of music crashing through the speakers. It was bliss. Bliss because I knew now that this night alone, out of all the long succession of dull, nugatory nights building up to it, would be special, that this was the night I’d meet Lisa and take her home with me. To my parents’ house in Pasadena, where I had a room of my own above the detached garage and could come and go as I pleased. My room. The place where I greased up my hair and stared at myself in the mirror and waited for something to happen, something like this, like what was coming in seven and a half real-time minutes. Zach said what sounded like “Look at that skank,” but since he had his face turned away from me and the music was cranked to the sonic level of a rocket launch (give credit to the X1520’s parametric speaker/audio-beam technology, which is infinitely more refined than the first generation’s), I wasn’t quite sure, though I must have heard him that night, my ears younger then, less damaged by scenes like this one, because I took hold of his arm and said, “Who? Her?” What I said now, though, was “Reset, reverse ten seconds,” and everything stalled, vanished, and started up once more, and here I was trying all over again to get the bartender’s attention and listening hard when Zach, leaning casually against the bar on two splayed elbows, opened his mouth to speak. “Look at that skank,” he said, undeniably, and there it was, coloring everything in the moment, because he was snap-judging Lisa, with her coat-hanger shoulders, Kabuki makeup, and shining black lips, and I said, “Who? Her?,” already attracted, because in my eyes she wasn’t a skank at all, or, if she was, she was a skank from some other realm altogether, and I couldn’t from that moment on think of anything but getting her to talk to me. Now, the frustrating thing about the current relive technology is that you can’t be an actor in the scene, only an observer, like Scrooge reliving his boarding-school agonies with the Ghost of Christmas Past at his elbow, so whatever howlers your adolescent self might have uttered are right there, hanging in the air, unedited. You can fast-forward, and I suppose most people do—skip the chatter; get to the sex—but, personally, after going straight to the carnal moments the first five or six times I relived a scene, I liked to go back and hear what I’d had to say, what she’d had to say, no matter how banal it might sound now. What I did that night—and I’d already relived this moment twice that week—was catch hold of the bartender and order not two but three G.-and-T.s, though I only had something like eighteen dollars in my wallet, set one on the bar for Zach, and cross the floor to where she was standing, just beneath the stage, in what would be the mosh pit half an hour later. She saw me coming, saw the drinks—two drinks—and looked away, covering herself, because she was sure I was toting that extra drink for somebody else, a girlfriend or a best bud, lurking in the drift of shadow that the stage lights drew up out of the murky walls. I tapped her shoulder. She turned her face to me. “Pause,” I said. Everything stopped. I was in a 3-D painting now, and so was she, and for the longest time I just kept things there, studying her face. She was eighteen years old, like me, beautiful enough underneath the paint and gel and eyeliner and all the rest to make me feel faint even now, and her eyes weren’t wary, weren’t used, but candid, ready, rich with expectation. I held my drink just under my nose, inhaling the smell of juniper berries to tweak the memory, and said, “Play.” “You look thirsty,” I said. The music boomed. Behind me, at the bar, Zach was giving me a look of disbelief, like What the?, because this was a violation of our club-going protocol. We didn’t talk to the girls, and especially not the skanks, because we were there for the music, at least that was what we told ourselves. (Second time around I did pause this part, just for the expression on his face—Zach, poor Zach, who never did find himself a girlfriend, as far as I know, and who’s probably someplace reliving every club he’s ever been in and every date he’s ever had, just to feel sorry for himself.) She levelled her eyes on me, gave it a beat, then took the cold glass from my hand. “How did you guess?” she said. What followed was the usual exchange of information about bands, books, neighborhood, high school, college, and then I was bragging about the bands I’d seen lately and she was countering with the band members she knew personally—like John Doe and the drummer for the Germs—and letting her eyes reveal just how personal that was, which only managed to inflame me till I wanted nothing more on this earth than to pin her in a corner and kiss the black lipstick right off her. What I said then, unaware that my carefully sculpted pompadour was collapsing across my brow in something very much like a bowl cut (or worse—anathema—a Beatles shag), was “You want to dance?” She gave me a look. Shot her eyes to the stage and back, then around the room. A few people were dancing to the canned music, most of them jerking and gyrating to their own drugged-out beat, and there was no sign—yet—of the band we’d come to hear. “To this?” “They’re organic, vegetarian, and they challenge traditional gender roles.”Buy the print » “Yeah,” I said, and I looked so—what was it?—needy, though at the time I must have thought I was chiselled out of a block of pure cool. “Come on,” I said, and I reached out a hand to her. I watched the decision firm up in her eyes, deep in this moment which would give rise to all the rest, to the part I was about to fast-forward to because I had to get up in the morning. For work. And no excuses. But watch, watch what comes next . . . She took my hand, the soft friction of her touch alive still somewhere in my cell memory, and then she was leading me out onto the dance floor. She was leading. And I was following. Will it surprise you to know that I exceeded my self-imposed two-hour limit? That after the sex I fast-forwarded to our first date, which was really just an agreed-upon meeting at Tower Records (March 2, 1982, 4:30 P.M.), and then up to Barney’s Beanery for cheeseburgers and beers and shots of peppermint schnapps (!), which she paid for, because her father was a rich executive at Warner Bros.? Or that that made me feel so good I couldn’t resist skipping ahead three months, to when she was as integral to my life as the Black Flag T-shirt that never left my back except in the shower? Lisa. Lisa Denardo. With her cat’s tongue and her tight, torquing body that was a girl’s and a woman’s at the same time and her perfect, evenly spaced set of glistening white teeth (perfect, that is, but for the incisor she’d had a dentist in Tijuana remove, in the spirit of punk solidarity). The scene I hit on was early the following summer, summer break of my sophomore year in college, when I gave up on my parents’ garage and Lisa and I moved into an off-campus apartment on Vermont and decided to paint the walls, ceiling, and floors the color of midnight in the Carlsbad Caverns. June 6, 1982, 2:44 P.M. The glisten of black paint, a too bright sun caught in the windows, and Lisa saying, “Think we should paint the glass, too?” I was oblivious of anything but her and me and the way I looked and the way she looked, a streak of paint on her left forearm and another, scimitar-shaped, just over one eyebrow, when suddenly everything went neutral and I was back in the reliving room, staring into the furious face of my daughter. But let me explain the technology here a moment, for those of you who don’t already know. This isn’t a computer screen or a TV or a hologram or anything anybody else can see—we’re talking retinal projection, two laser beams fixed on two eyeballs. Anybody coming into the room (daughter, wife, boss) will simply see you sitting there silently in a chair with your retinas lit like furnaces. Step in front of the projector—as my daughter had done now—and the image vanishes. “Stop,” I said, and I wasn’t talking to her. But there she was, her hair brushed out for school and her jaw clenched, looking hate at me. “I can’t believe you,” she said. “Do you have any idea what time it is?” Bleary, depleted—and guilty, deeply guilty—I just gawked at her, the light she’d flicked on when she came into the room transfixing me in the chair. I shook my head. “It’s 6:45 A.M. In the morning. The morning, Dad.” I started to say something, but the words were tangled up inside me, because Lisa was saying—had just said—“You’re not going to make me stay here and watch the paint dry, are you? Because I’m thinking maybe we could drive out to the beach or something, just to cool down,” and I said, or was going to say, “There’s, like, maybe half a pint of gas in the car.” “What?” Katie demanded. “Were you with Mom again? Is that it? Like you can be with her and I can’t?” “No,” I said, “no, that wasn’t it. It wasn’t your mom at all . . . ” A tremor ran through her. “Yeah, right. So what was it, then? Some girlfriend, somebody you were gaga over when you were in college? Or high school? Or, what, junior high?” “I must have fallen asleep,” I said. “Really. I just zoned out.” She knew I was lying. She’d come looking for me, dutiful child, motherless child, and found me not up and about and bustling around the kitchen, preparing to fuss over her and see her off to school, the way I used to, but pinned here in this chair, like an exhibit in a museum, blind to anything but the past, my past and nobody else’s, not hers or her mother’s, or the country’s or the world’s, just mine. I heard the door slam. Heard the thump of her angry feet in the hallway, the distant muffled crash of the front door, and then the house was quiet. I looked at the slit in the box. “Play,” I said. By the time I got to work, I was an hour and a half late, but on this day—miracle of miracles—Kevin was even later, and when he did show up I was ensconced in my cubicle, dutifully rattling keys on my keyboard. He didn’t say anything, just brushed by me and buried himself in his office, but I could see that he was wearing the same vacant pre-now look I was, and it didn’t take much of an intuitive leap to guess the reason. In fact, since the new model had come on the market, I’d noticed that randy, faraway gaze in the eyes of half a dozen of my fellow-employees, including Linda Blanco, the receptionist, who’d stopped buttoning the top three buttons of her blouse and wore shorter and shorter skirts every day. Instead of breathing “Moos and Associates, how may I help you?” into the receiver, now she just said, “Reset.” Was this a recipe for disaster? Was our whole society on the verge of breaking down? Was the N.S.A. going to step in? Were they going to pass laws? Ban the box? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I had a daughter to worry about. Thing was, all I could think of was getting home to relive, straight home, and if the image of a carton of milk or a loaf of bread flitted into my head I batted it away. Takeout. We could always get takeout. I was in a crucial phase with Lisa, heading inexorably for the grimmer scenes, the disagreements—petty at first, then monumental, unbridgeable, like the day I got home from my makeup class in calculus and found her sitting at the kitchen table with a stoner whose name I never did catch and didn’t want to know, not then or now—and I needed to get through it, not to analyze whether it hurt or not but because it was there and I had to relive it. I couldn’t help myself. I just kept picking at it like a scab. Ultimately, this was all about Christine, of course, about when I began to fail instead of succeed, to lose instead of win. I needed Lisa to remind me of a time before that, to help me trace my missteps and assign blame, because, as intoxicating as it was to relive the birds-atwitter moments with Christine, there was always something nagging at me in any given scene, some twitch of her face or a comment she threw out that should have raised flags at the time but never did. All right. Fine. I was going to go there, I was, and relive the minutiae of our relationship, the ecstasy and the agony both, the moments of mindless contentment and the swelling tide of antipathy that drove us apart, but first things first, and, as I fought my way home on the freeway that afternoon, all I could think about was Lisa. In the old days, before we got the box, my daughter and I had a Friday-afternoon ritual whereby I would stop in at the Italian place down the street from the house, have a drink and chat up whoever was there, then call Katie and have her come join me for a father-daughter dinner, so that I could have some face time with her, read into her, and suss out her thoughts and feelings as she grew into a young woman herself, but we didn’t do that anymore. There wasn’t time. The best I could offer—lately, especially—was takeout or a microwave pizza and a limp salad, choked down in the cold confines of the kitchen, while we separately calculated how long we had to put up with the pretense before slipping off to relive. There were no lights on in the house as I pulled into the driveway, and that was odd, because Katie should have been home from school by now—and she hadn’t texted me or phoned to say she’d be staying late. I climbed out of the car feeling stiff all over—I needed to get more exercise, I knew that, and I resolved to do it, too, as soon as I got my head above water—and as I came up the walk I saw the sad, frosted artificial wreath hanging crookedly there in the center panel of the front door. Katie must have dug it out of the box of ornaments in the garage on her own initiative, to do something by way of Christmas, and that gave me pause, that stopped me right there, the thought of it, of my daughter having to make the effort all by herself. That crushed me. It did. And as I put the key in the lock and pushed the door open I knew things were going to have to change. Dinner. I’d take her out to dinner and forget about Lisa. At least for now. “Katie?” I called. “You home?” No response. I shrugged out of my coat and went on into the kitchen, thinking to make myself a drink. There were traces of her there, her backpack flung down on the floor, an open bag of Doritos spilling across the counter, a Diet Sprite, half-full, on the breadboard. I called her name again, standing stock-still in the middle of the room and listening for the slightest hint of sound or movement as my voice echoed through the house. I was about to pull out my phone and call her when I thought of the reliving room, and it was a sinking thought, not a selfish one, because if she was in there, reliving—and she was, I knew she was—what did that say about her social life? Didn’t teen-age girls go out anymore? Didn’t they gather in packs at the mall or go to movies or post things on Facebook, or, forgive me, go out on dates? Group dates, even? How else were they going to experience the inchoate beginnings of what the Relive Box people were pushing in the first place? I shoved into the room, which was dark but for the lights of her eyes, and just stood there watching her for a long moment as I adjusted to the gloom. She sat riveted, her body present but her mind elsewhere, and if I was embarrassed—for her, and for me, too, her father, invading her privacy when she was most vulnerable—the embarrassment gave way to a sorrow so oceanic I thought I would drown in it. I studied her face. Watched her smile and grimace and go cold and smile again. What could she possibly be reliving when she’d lived so little? Family vacations? Christmases past? Her biannual trips to Hong Kong to be with her mother and stepfather? I couldn’t fathom it. I didn’t like it. It had to stop. I turned on the overhead light and stepped in front of the projector. She blinked at me and she didn’t recognize me, didn’t know me at all, because I was in the now and she was in the past. “Katie,” I said, “that’s enough, now. Come on.” I held out my arms to her, even as recognition came back into her eyes and she made a vague gesture of irritation, of pushing away. “Katie,” I said, “let’s go out to dinner. Just the two of us. Like we used to.” “I’m not hungry,” she said. “And it’s not fair. You can use it all you want, like, day and night, but whenever I want it—” And she broke off, tears starting in her eyes. “Come on,” I said. “It’ll be fun.” The look she gave me was unsparing. I was trying to deflect it, trying to think of something to say, when she got up out of the chair so suddenly it startled me, and, though I tried to take hold of her arm, she was too quick. Before I could react, she was at the door, pausing only to scorch me with another glare. “I don’t believe you,” she spat, before vanishing down the hall. I should have followed her, should have tried to make things right—or better, anyway—but I didn’t. The box was right there. It had shut down when she leaped up from the chair, and whatever she’d been reliving was buried back inside it, accessible to no one, though you can bet there are hackers out there right now trying to subvert the retinal-recognition feature. For a long moment, I stared at the open door, fighting myself, then I went over and softly shut it. I realized I didn’t need a drink or dinner, either. I sat down in the chair. “Hello, Wes,” the box said. “Welcome back.” We didn’t have a Christmas tree that year, and neither of us really cared all that much, I think—if we wanted to look at spangle-draped trees, we could relive holidays past, happier ones, or, in my case, I could go back to my childhood and relive my father’s whiskey in a glass and my mother’s long-suffering face blossoming over the greedy joy of her golden boy, her only child, tearing open his presents as a weak, bleached-out California sun haunted the windows and the turkey crackled in the oven. Katie went off (reluctantly, I thought) on a skiing vacation to Mammoth with the family of her best friend, Allison, whom she hardly saw anymore, not outside of school, not in the now, and I went back to Lisa, because if I was going to get to Christine in any serious way—beyond the sex, that is, beyond the holiday greetings and picture-postcard moments—Lisa was my bridge. Buy the print » As soon as I’d dropped Katie at Allison’s house and exchanged a few previously scripted salutations with Allison’s grinning parents and her grinning twin brothers, I stopped at a convenience store for a case of eight-ounce bottles of spring water and the biggest box of PowerBars I could find and went straight home to the reliving room. The night before, I’d been close to the crucial scene with Lisa, one that was as fixed in my memory as the blow-up with Christine a quarter century later, but elusive as to the date and time. I’d been up all night—again—fast-forwarding, reversing, jumping locales and facial expressions, Lisa’s first piercing, the evolution of my haircut, but I hadn’t been able to pinpoint the exact moment, not yet. I set the water on the floor on my left side, the PowerBars on my right. “May 9, 1983,” I said. “4 A.M.” The numbers flashed and then I was in darkness, zero visibility, confused as to where I was until the illuminated dial of a clock radio began to bleed through and I could make out the dim outline of myself lying in bed in the back room of that apartment with the black walls and the black ceiling and the black floor. Lisa was there beside me, an irregular hump in the darkness, snoring with a harsh gag and stutter. She was stoned. And drunk. Half an hour earlier, she’d been in the bathroom, heaving over the toilet, and I realized I’d come too far. “Reset,” I said. “Reverse ninety minutes.” Sudden light, blinding after the darkness, and I was alone in the living room of the apartment, studying, or trying to. My hair hung limp, my muscles were barely there, but I was young and reasonably good-looking, even excusing any bias. I saw that my Black Flag T-shirt had faded to gray from too much sun and too many washings, and the book in my lap looked as familiar as something I might have been buried with in a previous life, but then this was my previous life. I watched myself turn a page, crane my neck toward the door, get up to flip over the album that was providing the soundtrack. “Reset,” I said. “Fast-forward ten minutes.” And here it was, what I’d been searching for: a sudden crash, the front door flinging back, Lisa and the stoner whose name I didn’t want to know fumbling their way in, both of them as slow as syrup with the cumulative effect of downers and alcohol, and though the box didn’t have an olfactory feature, I swear I could smell the tequila on them. I jumped up out of my chair, spilling the book, and shouted something I couldn’t quite make out, so I said, “Reset, reverse five seconds.” “You fucker!” was what I’d shouted, and now I shouted it again, prior to slapping something out of the guy’s hand, a beer bottle, and all at once I had him in a hammerlock and Lisa was beating at my back with her bird-claw fists and I was wrestling the guy out the door, cursing over the soundtrack (“Should I Stay or Should I Go”—one of those flatline ironies which almost make you believe everything in this life’s been programmed). I saw now that he was bigger than I was, probably stronger, too, but the drugs had taken the volition out of him, and in the next moment he was outside the door and the three bolts were hammered home. By me. Who now turned in a rage to Lisa. “Stop,” I said. “Freeze.” Lisa hung there, defiant and guilty at the same time, pretty, breathtakingly pretty, despite the slack mouth and the drugged-out eyes. I should have left it there and gone on to those first cornucopian weeks and months and even years with Christine, but I couldn’t help myself. “Play,” I said, and Lisa raised a hand to swat at me, but she was too unsteady and knocked the lamp over instead. “Did you fuck him?” I demanded. There was a long pause, so long I almost fast-forwarded, and then she said, “Yeah. Yeah, I fucked him. And I’ll tell you something”—her words glutinous, the syllables coalescing on her tongue—“you’re no punk. And he is. He’s the real deal. And you? You’re, you’re—” I should have stopped it right there. “—you’re prissy.” “Prissy?” I couldn’t believe it. Not then and not now. She made a broad stoned gesture, weaving on her feet. “Anal-retentive. Like, who left the dishes in the sink or who didn’t take out the garbage or what about the cockroaches—” “Stop,” I said. “Reset. June 19, 1994, 11:02 P.M.” I was in another bedroom now, one with walls the color of cream, and I was in another bed, this time with Christine, and I’d timed the memory to the very minute, postcoital, in the afterglow, and Christine, with her soft aspirated whisper of a voice, was saying, “I love you, Wes, you know that, don’t you?” “Stop,” I said. “Reverse five seconds.” She said it again. And I stopped again. And reversed again. And she said it again. And again. Time has no meaning when you’re reliving. I don’t know how long I kept it up, how long I kept surfing through those moments with Christine—not the sexual ones but the loving ones, the companionable ones, the ordinary day-to-day moments when I could see in her eyes that she loved me more than anybody alive and was never going to stop loving me, never. Dinner at the kitchen table, any dinner, any night. Just to be there. My wife. My daughter. The way the light poured liquid gold over the hardwood floors of our starter house, in Canoga Park. Katie’s first birthday. Her first word (“Cake!”). The look on Christine’s face as she curled up with Katie in bed and read her “Where the Wild Things Are.” Her voice as she hoarsened it for Max: “I’ll eat you up!” Enough analysis, enough hurt. I was no masochist. At some point, I had to get up from that chair in the now and evacuate a living bladder, the house silent, spectral, unreal. I didn’t live here. I didn’t live in the now with its deadening nine-to-five job I was in danger of losing and the daughter I was failing and a wife who’d left me—and her own daughter—for Winston Chen, a choreographer of martial-arts movies in Hong Kong, who was loving and kind and funny and not the control freak I was. (Prissy, anyone? Anal-retentive?) The house echoed with my footsteps, a stage set and nothing more. I went to the kitchen and dug the biggest pot I could find out from under the sink, brought it back to the reliving room, and set it on the floor between my legs to save me the trouble of getting up next time around. Time passed. Relived time and lived time, too. There were two windows in the room, shades drawn so as not to interfere with the business of the moment, and sometimes a faint glow appeared around the margins of them, an effect I noticed when I was searching for a particular scene and couldn’t quite pin it down. Sometimes the glow was gone. Sometimes it wasn’t. What happened then, and I may have been two days in or three or five, I couldn’t really say, was that things began to cloy. I’d relived an exclusive diet of the transcendent, the joyful, the insouciant, the best of Christine, the best of Lisa, and all the key moments of the women who came between and after, and I’d gone back to the Intermediate Algebra test, the very instant, pencil to paper, when I knew I’d scored a perfect one hundred per cent, and to the time I’d squirted a ball to right field with two outs, two strikes, ninth inning and my Little League team (the Condors, yellow Ts, white lettering) down by three, and watched it rise majestically over the glove of the spastic red-haired kid sucking back allergic snot and roll all the way to the wall. Triumph after triumph, goodness abounding—till it stuck in my throat. “Reset,” I said. “January 2, 2009,4:30 P.M.” I found myself in the kitchen of our second house, this house, the one we’d moved to because it was outside the L.A. city limits and had schools we felt comfortable sending Katie to. That was what mattered: the schools. And, if it lengthened our commutes, so be it. This house. The one I was reliving in now. Everything gleamed around me, counters polished, the glass of the cabinets as transparent as air, because details mattered then, everything in its place whether Christine was there or not—especially if she wasn’t there, and where was she? Or where had she been? To China. With her boss. On film business. Her bags were just inside the front door, where she’d dropped them forty-five minutes ago, after I’d picked her up at the airport and we’d had our talk in the car, the talk I was going to relive when I got done here, because it was all about pain now, about reality, and this scene was the capper, the coup de grâce. You want wounds? You want to take a razor blade to the meat of your inner thigh just to see if you can still feel? Well, here it was. Christine entered the scene now, coming down the stairs from Katie’s room, her eyes wet, or damp, anyway, and her face composed. I pushed myself up from the table, my beginner’s bald spot a glint of exposed flesh under the glare of the overhead light. I spoke first. “You tell her?” Christine was dressed in her business attire, black stockings, heels, skirt to the knee, tailored jacket. She looked exhausted, and not simply from the fifteen-hour flight but from what she’d had to tell me. And our daughter. (How I’d like to be able to relive that, to hear how she’d even broached the subject, let alone how she’d smoke-screened her own selfishness and betrayal with some specious concern for Katie’s well-being—let’s not rock the boat and you’ll be better off here with your father and your school and your teachers and it’s not the end but just the beginning, buck up, you’ll see.) Christine’s voice was barely audible. “I don’t like this any better than you do.” “Then why do it?” A long pause. Too long. “Stop,” I said. I couldn’t do this. My heart was hammering. My eyes felt as if they were being squeezed in a vise. I could barely swallow. I reached down for a bottle of water and a PowerBar, drank, chewed. She was going to say, “This isn’t working,” and I was going to say, “Working? What the fuck are you talking about? What does work have to do with it? I thought this was about love. I thought it was about commitment.” I knew I wasn’t going to get violent, though I should have, should have chased her out to the cab that was even then waiting at the curb and slammed my way in and flown all the way to Hong Kong to confront Winston Chen, the martial-arts genius, who could have crippled me with his bare feet. “Reset,” I said. “August, 1975, any day, any time.” There was a hum from the box. “Incomplete command. Please select date and time.” I was twelve years old, the summer we went to Vermont, to a lake there, where the mist came up off the water like the fumes of a dream and deer mice lived under the refrigerator, and I didn’t have a date or time fixed in my mind—I just needed to get away from Christine, that was all. I picked the first thing that came into my head. “August 19th,” I said. “11:30 A.M. Play.” A blacktop road. Sun like a nuclear blast. A kid, running. I recognized myself—I’d been to this summer before, one I remembered as idyllic, messing around in boats, fishing, swimming, wandering the woods with one of the local kids, Billy Scharf, everything neutral, copacetic. But why was I running? And why did I have that look on my face, a look that fused determination and helplessness both? Up the drive now, up the steps to the house, shouting for my parents: “Mom! Dad!” I began to have a bad feeling. I saw my father get up off the wicker sofa on the porch, my vigorous young father, who was dressed in a T-shirt and jeans and didn’t have even a trace of gray in his hair, my father, who always made everything right. But not this time. “What’s the matter?” he said. “What is it?” And my mother coming through the screen door to the porch, a towel in one hand and her hair snarled wet from the lake. And me. I was fighting back tears, my legs and arms like sticks, striped polo shirt, faded shorts. “It’s,” I said, “it’s—” “Stop,” I said. “Reset.” It was my dog, Queenie, that was what it was, dead on the road that morning, and who’d left the gate ajar so she could get out in the first place? Even though he’d been warned about it a hundred times? I was in a dark room. There was a pot between my legs, and it was giving off a fierce odor. I needed to go deeper, needed out of this. I spouted random dates, saw myself driving to work, stuck in traffic with ten thousand other fools who could only wish they had a fast-forward app, saw myself in my thirties, post-Lisa, pre-Christine, obsessing over Halo, and I stayed there through all the toppling hours, reliving myself in the game, boxes within boxes, until finally I thought of God, or what passes for God in my life, the mystery beyond words, beyond lasers and silicon chips. I gave a date nine months before I was born, “December 30, 1962, 6 A.M.,” when I was, what—a zygote?—but the box gave me nothing, neither visual nor audio. And that was wrong, deeply wrong. There should have been a heartbeat. My mother’s heartbeat, the first thing we hear—or feel, feel before we even have ears. “Stop,” I said. “Reset.” A wave of rising exhilaration swept over me even as the words came to my lips, “September 30, 1963, 2:35 A.M.,” and the drumbeat started up, ba-boom, ba-boom, but no visual, not yet, the minutes ticking by, ba-boom, ba-boom, and then I was there, in the light of this world, and my mother in her stained hospital gown and the man with the monobrow and the flashing glasses, the stranger, the doctor, saying what he was going to say by way of congratulations and relief. A boy. It’s a boy. Then it all went dead, and there was somebody standing in front of me, and I didn’t recognize her, not at first, how could I? “Dad,” she was saying. “Dad, are you there?” I blinked. Tried to focus. “No,” I said finally, shaking my head in slow emphasis, the word itself, the denial, heavy as a stone in my mouth. “I’m not here. I’m not. I’m not.”

The new mother, groggy from a nap, sat at the table as though she did not grasp why she had been summoned. Perhaps she never would, Auntie Mei thought. On the placemat sat a bowl of soybean-and-pig’s-foot soup that Auntie Mei had cooked, as she had for many new mothers before this one. Many, however, was not exact. In her interviews with potential employers, Auntie Mei always gave the precise number of families she had worked for: a hundred and twenty-six when she interviewed with her current employer, a hundred and thirty-one babies altogether. The families’ contact information, the dates she had worked for them, their babies’ names and birthdays—these she had recorded in a palm-size notebook, which had twice fallen apart and been taped back together. Years ago, Auntie Mei had bought it at a garage sale in Moline, Illinois. She had liked the picture of flowers on the cover, purple and yellow, unmelted snow surrounding the chaste petals. She had liked the price of the notebook, too: five cents. When she handed a dime to the child with the cash box on his lap, she asked if there was another notebook she could buy, so that he would not have to give her any change; the boy looked perplexed and said no. It was greed that had made her ask, but when the memory came back—it often did when she took the notebook out of her suitcase for another interview—Auntie Mei would laugh at herself: why on earth had she wanted two notebooks, when there’s not enough life to fill one? The mother sat still, not touching the spoon, until teardrops fell into the steaming soup. “Now, now,” Auntie Mei said. She was pushing herself and the baby in a new rocking chair—back and forth, back and forth, the squeaking less noticeable than yesterday. I wonder who’s enjoying the rocking more, she said to herself: the chair, whose job is to rock until it breaks apart, or you, whose life is being rocked away? And which one of you will meet your demise first? Auntie Mei had long ago accepted that she had, despite her best intentions, become one of those people who talk to themselves when the world is not listening. At least she took care not to let the words slip out. “I don’t like this soup,” said the mother, who surely had a Chinese name but had asked Auntie Mei to call her Chanel. Auntie Mei, however, called every mother Baby’s Ma, and every infant Baby. It was simple that way, one set of clients easily replaced by the next. “It’s not for you to like,” Auntie Mei said. The soup had simmered all morning and had thickened to a milky white. She would never have touched it herself, but it was the best recipe for breast-feeding mothers. “You eat it for Baby.” “Why do I have to eat for him?” Chanel said. She was skinny, though it had been only five days since the delivery. “Why, indeed,” Auntie Mei said, laughing. “Where else do you think your milk comes from?” “I’m not a cow.” I would rather you were a cow, Auntie Mei thought. But she merely threatened gently that there was always the option of formula. Auntie Mei wouldn’t mind that, but most people hired her for her expertise in taking care of newborns and breast-feeding mothers. The young woman started to sob. Really, Auntie Mei thought, she had never seen anyone so unfit to be a mother as this little creature. “I think I have postpartum depression,” Chanel said when her tears had stopped. Some fancy term the young woman had picked up. “My great-grandmother hanged herself when my grandfather was three days old. People said she’d fallen under the spell of some passing ghost, but this is what I think.” Using her iPhone as a mirror, Chanel checked her face and pressed her puffy eyelids with a finger. “She had postpartum depression.” Auntie Mei stopped rocking and snuggled the infant closer. At once his head started bumping against her bosom. “Don’t speak nonsense,” she said sternly. “I’m only explaining what postpartum depression is.” “Your problem is that you’re not eating. Nobody would be happy if they were in your shoes.” “Nobody,” Chanel said glumly, “could possibly be in my shoes. Do you know what I dreamed last night?” “No.” “Take a guess.” “In our village, we say it’s bad luck to guess someone else’s dreams,” Auntie Mei said. Only ghosts entered and left people’s minds freely. “I dreamed that I flushed Baby down the toilet.” “Oh. I wouldn’t have guessed that even if I’d tried.” “That’s the problem. Nobody knows how I feel,” Chanel said, and started to weep again. Auntie Mei sniffed under the child’s blanket, paying no heed to the fresh tears. “Baby needs a diaper change,” she announced, knowing that, given some time, Chanel would acquiesce: a mother is a mother, even if she speaks of flushing her child down the drain. Auntie Mei had worked as a live-in nanny for newborns and their mothers for eleven years. As a rule, she moved out of the family’s house the day a baby turned a month old, unless—though this rarely happened—she was between jobs, which was never more than a few days. Many families would have been glad to pay her extra for another week, or another month; some even offered a longer term, but Auntie Mei always declined: she worked as a first-month nanny, whose duties, toward both the mother and the infant, were different from those of a regular nanny. Once in a while, she was approached by previous employers to care for their second child. The thought of facing a child who had once been an infant in her arms led to lost sleep; she agreed only when there was no other option, and she treated the older children as though they were empty air. Between bouts of sobbing, Chanel said she did not understand why her husband couldn’t take a few days off. The previous day he had left for Shenzhen on a business trip. “What right does he have to leave me alone with his son?” Alone? Auntie Mei squinted at Baby’s eyebrows, knitted so tight that the skin in between took on a tinge of yellow. Your pa is working hard so your ma can stay home and call me nobody. The Year of the Snake, an inauspicious one to give birth in, had been slow for Auntie Mei; otherwise, she would’ve had better options. She had not liked the couple when she met them; unlike most expectant parents, they had both looked distracted, and asked few questions before offering her the position. They were about to entrust their baby to a stranger, Auntie Mei had wanted to remind them, but neither seemed worried. Perhaps they had gathered enough references? Auntie Mei did have a reputation as a gold-medal nanny. Her employers were the lucky ones, to have had a good education in China and, later, America, and to have become professionals in the Bay Area: lawyers, doctors, V.C.s, engineers—no matter, they still needed an experienced Chinese nanny for their American-born babies. Many families lined her up months before their babies were born. Baby, cleaned and swaddled, seemed satisfied, so Auntie Mei left him on the changing table and looked out the window, enjoying, as she always did, a view that did not belong to her. Between an azalea bush and a slate path, there was a man-made pond, which hosted an assortment of goldfish and lily pads. Before he left, the husband had asked Auntie Mei to feed the fish and refill the pond. Eighteen hundred gallons a year, he had informed her, calculating the expense. She would have refused the additional responsibilities if not for his readiness to pay her an extra twenty dollars each day. A statue of an egret, balanced on one leg, stood in the water, its neck curved into a question mark. Auntie Mei thought about the man who had made the sculpture. Of course, it could have been a woman, but Auntie Mei refused to accept that possibility. She liked to believe that it was men who made beautiful and useless things like the egret. Let him be a lonely man, beyond the reach of any fiendish woman. Baby started to wiggle. Don’t you stir before your ma finishes her soup, Auntie Mei warned in a whisper, though in vain. The egret, startled, took off with an unhurried elegance, its single squawk stunning Auntie Mei and then making her laugh. For sure, you’re getting old and forgetful: there was no such statue yesterday. Auntie Mei picked up Baby and went into the yard. There were fewer goldfish now, but at least some had escaped the egret’s raid. All the same, she would have to tell Chanel about the loss. You think you have a problem with postpartum depression? Think of the goldfish, living one day in a paradise pond and the next day going to Heaven in the stomach of a passing egret. Auntie Mei believed in strict routines for every baby and mother in her charge. For the first week, she fed the mother six meals a day, with three snacks in between; from the second week on, it was four meals and two snacks. The baby was to be nursed every two hours during the day, and every three or four hours at night. She let the parents decide whether the crib was kept in their bedroom or in the nursery, but she would not allow it in her bedroom. No, this was not for her convenience, she explained to them; there was simply no reason for a baby to be close to someone who was there for only a month. “But it’s impossible to eat so much. People are different,” Chanel said the next day. Less weepy at the moment, she was curled up on the sofa, a pair of heating pads on her chest: Auntie Mei had not been impressed with the young woman’s milk production. You can be as different as you want after I leave, Auntie Mei thought as she bathed Baby; your son can grow into a lopsided squash and I won’t care a bit. But no mother or baby could deviate just yet. The reason people hired a first-month nanny, Auntie Mei told Chanel, was to make sure that things went correctly, not differently. “But did you follow this schedule when you had your children? I bet you didn’t.” “As a matter of fact, I didn’t, only because I didn’t have children.” “Not even one?” “You didn’t specify a nanny who had her own children.” “But why would you . . . why did you choose this line of work?” Why indeed. “Sometimes a job chooses you,” Auntie Mei said. Ha, who knew she could be so profound? “But you must love children, then?” Oh, no, no, not this one or that one; not any of them. “Does a bricklayer love his bricks?” Auntie Mei asked. “Does the dishwasher repairman love the dishwashers?” That morning, a man had come to look at Chanel’s malfunctioning dishwasher. It had taken him only twenty minutes of poking, but the bill was a hundred dollars, as much as a whole day’s wages for Auntie Mei. “Auntie, that’s not a good argument.” “My job doesn’t require me to argue well. If I could argue, I’d have become a lawyer, like your husband, no?” Chanel made a mirthless laughing sound. Despite her self-diagnosed depression, she seemed to enjoy talking with Auntie Mei more than most mothers, who talked to her about their babies and their breast-feeding but otherwise had little interest in her. Buy the print » Auntie Mei put Baby on the sofa next to Chanel, who was unwilling to make room. “Now, let’s look into this milk situation,” Auntie Mei said, rubbing her hands until they were warm before removing the heating pads. Chanel cried out in pain. “I haven’t even touched you.” Look at your eyes, Auntie Mei wanted to say. Not even a good plumber could fix such a leak. “I don’t want to nurse this thing anymore,” Chanel said. This thing? “He’s your son.” “His father’s, too. Why can’t he be here to help?” “Men don’t make milk.” Chanel laughed, despite her tears. “No. The only thing they make is money.” “You’re lucky to have found one who makes money. Not all of them do, you know.” Chanel dried her eyes carefully with the inside of her pajama sleeve. “Auntie, are you married?” “Once,” Auntie Mei said. “What happened? Did you divorce him?” “He died,” Auntie Mei said. She had, every day of her marriage, wished that her husband would stop being part of her life, though not in so absolute a manner. Now, years later, she still felt responsible for his death, as though it were she, and not a group of teen-agers, who had accosted him that night. Why didn’t you just let them take the money? Sometimes Auntie Mei scolded him when she tired of talking to herself. Thirty-five dollars for a life, three months short of fifty-two. “Was he much older than you?” “Older, yes, but not too old.” “My husband is twenty-eight years older than I am,” Chanel said. “I bet you didn’t guess that.” “No, I didn’t.” “Is it that I look old or that he looks young?” “You look like a good match.” “Still, he’ll probably die before me, right? Women live longer than men, and he’s had a head start.” So you, too, are eager to be freed. Let me tell you, it’s bad enough when a wish like that doesn’t come true, but, if it ever does, that’s when you know that living is a most disappointing business: the world is not a bright place to start with, but a senseless wish granted senselessly makes it much dimmer. “Don’t speak nonsense,” Auntie Mei said. “I’m only stating the truth. How did your husband die? Was it a heart attack?” “You could say that,” Auntie Mei said, and before Chanel could ask more questions Auntie Mei grabbed one of her erring breasts. Chanel gasped and then screamed. Auntie Mei did not let go until she’d given the breast a forceful massage. When she reached for the other breast, Chanel screamed louder but did not change her position, for fear of crushing Baby, perhaps. Afterward, Auntie Mei brought a warm towel. “Go,” Chanel said. “I don’t want you here anymore.” “But who’ll take care of you?” “I don’t need anyone to take care of me.” Chanel stood up and belted her robe. “And Baby?” “Bad luck for him.” Chanel walked to the staircase, her back defiantly rigid. Auntie Mei picked up Baby, his weight as insignificant as the emotions—sadness, anger, or dismay—that she should feel on his behalf. Rather, Auntie Mei was in awe of the young woman. That is how, Auntie Mei said to herself, a mother orphans a child. Baby, six days old that day, was weaned from his mother’s breast. Auntie Mei was now the sole person to provide him with food and care and—this she did not want to admit even to herself—love. Chanel stayed in her bedroom and watched Chinese television dramas all afternoon. Once in a while, she came downstairs for water, and spoke to Auntie Mei as though the old woman and the infant were poor relations: there was the inconvenience of having them to stay, and yet there was relief that they did not have to be entertained. The dishwasher repairman returned in the evening. He reminded Auntie Mei that his name was Paul. As though she were so old that she could forget it in a day, she thought. Earlier, she had told him about the thieving egret, and he had promised to come back and fix the problem. “You’re sure the bird won’t be killed,” Auntie Mei said as she watched Paul rig some wires above the pond. “Try it yourself,” Paul said, flipping the battery switch. Auntie Mei placed her palm on the crisscrossed wires. “I feel nothing.” “Good. If you felt something, I’d be putting your life at risk. Then you could sue me.” “But how does it work?” “Let’s hope the egret is more sensitive than you are,” Paul said. “Call me if it doesn’t work. I won’t charge you again.” Auntie Mei felt doubtful, but her questioning silence did not stop him from admiring his own invention. Nothing, he said, is too difficult for a thinking man. When he put away his tools he lingered on, and she could see that there was no reason for him to hurry home. He had grown up in Vietnam, he told Auntie Mei, and had come to America thirty-seven years ago. He was widowed, with three grown children, and none of them had given him a grandchild, or the hope of one. His two sisters, both living in New York and both younger, had beaten him at becoming grandparents. The same old story: they all had to come from somewhere, and they all accumulated people along the way. Auntie Mei could see the unfolding of Paul’s life: he’d work his days away till he was too old to be useful, then his children would deposit him in a facility and visit on his birthday and on holidays. Auntie Mei, herself an untethered woman, felt superior to him. She raised Baby’s tiny fist as Paul was leaving. “Say bye-bye to Grandpa Paul.” Auntie Mei turned and looked up at the house. Chanel was leaning on the windowsill of her second-floor bedroom. “Is he going to electrocute the egret?” she called down. “He said it would only zap the bird. To teach it a lesson.” “You know what I hate about people? They like to say, ‘That will teach you a lesson.’ But what’s the point of a lesson? There’s no makeup exam when you fail something in life.” It was October, and the evening air from the Bay had a chill to it. Auntie Mei had nothing to say except to warn Chanel not to catch a cold. “Who cares?” “Maybe your parents do.” Chanel made a dismissive noise. “Or your husband.” “Ha. He just e-mailed and told me he had to stay for another ten days,” Chanel said. “You know what I think he’s doing right now? Sleeping with a woman, or more than one.” Auntie Mei did not reply. It was her policy not to disparage an employer behind his back. But when she entered the house Chanel was already in the living room. “I think you should know he’s not the kind of person you thought he was.” “I don’t think he’s any kind of person at all,” Auntie Mei said. “You never say a bad word about him,” Chanel said. Not a good word, either. “He had a wife and two children before.” You think a man, any man, would remain a bachelor until he meets you? Auntie Mei put the slip of paper with Paul’s number in her pocket. “Did that man leave you his number?” Chanel said. “Is he courting you?” “Him? Half of him, if not more, is already in the coffin.” “Men chase after women until the last moment,” Chanel said. “Auntie, don’t fall for him. No man is to be trusted.” Auntie Mei sighed. “If Baby’s Pa is not coming home, who’s going to shop for groceries?” The man of the house postponed his return; Chanel refused to have anything to do with Baby. Against her rules, Auntie Mei moved his crib into her bedroom; against her rules, too, she took on the responsibility of grocery shopping. “Do you suppose people will think we’re the grandparents of this baby?” Paul asked after inching the car into a tight spot between two S.U.V.s. Could it be that he had agreed to drive and help with shopping for a reason other than the money Auntie Mei had promised him? “Nobody,” she said, handing a list to Paul, “will think anything. Baby and I will wait here in the car.” “You’re not coming in?” “He’s a brand-new baby. You think I would bring him into a store with a bunch of refrigerators?” “You should’ve left him home, then.” With whom? Auntie Mei worried that, had she left Baby home, he would be gone from the world when she returned, though this fear she would not share with Paul. She explained that Baby’s Ma suffered from postpartum depression and was in no shape to take care of him. “You should’ve just given me the shopping list,” Paul said. What if you ran off with the money without delivering the groceries? she thought, though it was unfair of her. There were men she knew she could trust, including, even, her dead husband. On the drive back, Paul asked if the egret had returned. She hadn’t noticed, Auntie Mei replied. She wondered if she would have an opportunity to see the bird be taught its lesson: she had only twenty-two days left. Twenty-two days, and then the next family would pluck her out of here, egret or no egret. Auntie Mei turned to look at Baby, who was asleep in the car seat. “What will become of you then?” she said. “Me?” Paul asked. “Not you. Baby.” “Why do you worry? He’ll have a good life. Better than mine. Better than yours, for sure.” “You don’t know my life to say that,” Auntie Mei said. “I can imagine. You should find someone. This is not a good life for you, going from one house to another and never settling down.” “What’s wrong with that? I don’t pay rent. I don’t have to buy my own food.” “What’s the point of making money if you don’t spend it?” Paul said. “I’m at least saving money for my future grandchildren.” “What I do with my money,” Auntie Mei said, “is none of your business. Now, please pay attention to the road.” Paul, chastened into a rare silence, drove on, the slowest car on the freeway. Perhaps he’d meant well, but there were plenty of well-meaning men, and she was one of those women who made such men suffer. If Paul wanted to hear stories, she could tell him one or two, and spare him any hope of winning her affection. But where would she start? With the man she had married without any intention of loving and had wished into an early grave, or with the father she had not met because her mother had made his absolute absence a condition of her birth? Or perhaps she should start with her grandmother, who vanished from her own daughter’s crib side one day, only to show up twenty-five years later when her husband was dying from a wasting illness. The disappearance would have made sense had Auntie Mei’s grandfather been a villain, but he had been a kind man, and had raised his daughter alone, clinging to the hope that his wife, having left without a word, would return. Auntie Mei’s grandmother had not gone far: all those years, she had stayed in the same village, living with another man, hiding in his attic during the day, sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night for a change of air. Nobody was able to understand why she had not gone on hiding until after her husband’s death. She explained that it was her wifely duty to see her husband off properly. “Well, your quantum computer is broken in every way possible simultaneously.”Buy the print » Auntie Mei’s mother, newly married and with a prospering business as a seamstress, was said to have accepted one parent’s return and the other’s death with equanimity, but the next year, pregnant with her first and only child, she made her husband leave by threatening to drink a bottle of DDT. Auntie Mei had been raised by two mythic women. The villagers had shunned the two women, but they had welcomed the girl as one of them. Behind closed doors, they had told her about her grandfather and her father, and in their eyes she had seen their fearful disapproval of her elders: her pale-skinned grandmother, unused to daylight after years of darkness, had carried on her nocturnal habits, cooking and knitting for her daughter and granddaughter in the middle of the night; her mother, eating barely enough, had slowly starved herself to death, yet she never tired of watching, with an unblinking intensity, her daughter eat. Auntie Mei had not thought of leaving home until the two women died, her mother first, and then her grandmother. They had been sheltered from worldly reproach by their peculiarities when alive; in death, they took with them their habitat, and left nothing to anchor Auntie Mei. A marriage offer, arranged by the distant cousin of a man in Queens, New York, had been accepted without hesitation: in a new country, her grandmother and her mother would cease to be legendary. Auntie Mei had not told her husband about them; he would not have been interested, in any case—silly good man, wanting only a hardworking woman to share a solid life. Auntie Mei turned to look at Paul. Perhaps he was not so different from her husband, her father, her grandfather, or even the man her grandmother had lived with for years but never returned to after the death of Auntie Mei’s grandfather: ordinary happiness, uncomplicated by the women in their lives, was their due. “You think, by any chance, you’ll be free tomorrow afternoon?” Paul asked when he’d parked the car in front of Chanel’s house. “I work all day, as you know.” “You could bring Baby, like you did today.” “To where?” Paul said that there was this man who played chess every Sunday afternoon at East-West Plaza Park. Paul wanted to take a walk with Auntie Mei and Baby nearby. Auntie Mei laughed. “Why, so he’ll get distracted and lose the game?” “I want him to think I’ve done better than him.” Better how? With a borrowed lady friend pushing a borrowed grandson in a stroller? “Who is he?” “Nobody important. I haven’t talked to him for twenty-seven years.” He couldn’t even lie well. “And you still think he’d fall for your trick?” “I know him.” Auntie Mei wondered if knowing someone—a friend, an enemy—was like never letting that person out of one’s sight. Being known, then, must not be far from being imprisoned by someone else’s thought. In that sense, her grandmother and her mother had been fortunate: no one could claim to have known them, not even Auntie Mei. When she was younger, she had seen no point in understanding them, as she had been told they were beyond apprehension. After their deaths, they had become abstract. Not knowing them, Auntie Mei, too, had the good fortune of not wanting to know anyone who came after: her husband; her co-workers at various Chinese restaurants during her yearlong migration from New York to San Francisco; the babies and the mothers she took care of, who had become only recorded names in her notebook. “I’d say let it go,” Auntie Mei told Paul. “What kind of grudge is worthy of twenty-seven years?” Paul sighed. “If I tell you the story, you’ll understand.” “Please,” Auntie Mei said. “Don’t tell me any story.” From the second-floor landing, Chanel watched Paul put the groceries in the refrigerator and Auntie Mei warm up a bottle of formula. Only after he’d left did Chanel call down to ask how their date had gone. Auntie Mei held Baby in the rocking chair; the joy of watching him eat was enough of a compensation for his mother’s being a nuisance. Chanel came downstairs and sat on the sofa. “I saw you pull up. You stayed in the car for a long time,” she said. “I didn’t know an old man could be so romantic.” Auntie Mei thought of taking Baby into her bedroom, but this was not her house, and she knew that Chanel, in a mood to talk, would follow her. When Auntie Mei remained quiet, Chanel said that her husband had called earlier, and she had told him that his son had gone out to witness a couple carry on a sunset affair. You should walk out right this minute, Auntie Mei said to herself, but her body settled into the rhythm of the rocking chair, back and forth, back and forth. “Are you angry, Auntie?” “What did your husband say?” “He was upset, of course, and I told him that’s what he gets for not coming home.” What’s stopping you from leaving? Auntie Mei asked herself. You want to believe you’re staying for Baby, don’t you? “You should be happy for me that he’s upset,” Chanel said. “Or at least happy for Baby, no?” I’m happy that, like everyone else, you’ll all become the past soon. “Why are you so quiet, Auntie? I’m sorry I’m such a pain, but I don’t have a friend here, and you’ve been nice to me. Would you please take care of me and Baby?” “You’re paying me,” Auntie Mei said. “So of course I’ll take care of you.” “Will you be able to stay on after this month?” Chanel asked. “I’ll pay double.” “I don’t work as a regular nanny.” “But what would we do without you, Auntie?” Don’t let this young woman’s sweet voice deceive you, Auntie Mei warned herself: you’re not irreplaceable—not for her, not for Baby, not for anyone. Still, Auntie Mei fancied for a moment that she could watch Baby grow—a few months, a year, two years. “When is Baby’s Pa coming home?” “He’ll come home when he comes.” Auntie Mei cleaned Baby’s face with the corner of a towel. “I know what you’re thinking—that I didn’t choose the right man. Do you want to know how I came to marry someone so old and irresponsible?” “I don’t, as a matter of fact.” All the same, they told Auntie Mei stories, not heeding her protests. The man who played chess every Sunday afternoon came from the same village as Paul’s wife, and had long ago been pointed out to him by her as a potentially better husband. Perhaps she had said it only once, out of an impulse to sting Paul, or perhaps she had tormented him for years with her approval of a former suitor. Paul did not say, and Auntie Mei did not ask. Instead, he had measured his career against the man’s: Paul had become a real professional; the man had stayed a laborer. An enemy could be as eternally close as a friend; a feud could make two men brothers for life. Fortunate are those for whom everyone can be turned into a stranger, Auntie Mei thought, but this wisdom she did not share with Paul. He had wanted her only to listen, and she had obliged him. Chanel, giving more details, and making Auntie blush at times, was a better storyteller. She had slept with an older married man to punish her father, who had himself pursued a young woman, in this case one of Chanel’s college classmates. The pregnancy was meant to punish her father, too, but also the man, who, like her father, had cheated on his wife. “He didn’t know who I was at first. I made up a story so that he thought I was one of those girls he could sleep with and then pay off,” Chanel had said. “But then he realized he had no choice but to marry me. My father has enough connections to destroy his business.” Had she not thought how this would make her mother feel? Auntie Mei asked. Why should she? Chanel replied. A woman who could not keep the heart of her man was not a good model for a daughter. Auntie Mei did not understand their logic: Chanel’s depraved; Paul’s unbending. What a world you’ve been born into, Auntie Mei said to Baby now. It was past midnight, the lamp in her bedroom turned off. The night-light of swimming ocean animals on the crib streaked Baby’s face blue and orange. There must have been a time when her mother had sat with her by candlelight, or else her grandmother might have been there in the darkness. What kind of future had they wished for her? She had been brought up in two worlds: the world of her grandmother and her mother, and that of everyone else; each world had sheltered her from the other, and to lose one was to be turned, against her wish, into a permanent resident of the other. Auntie Mei came from a line of women who could not understand themselves, and in not knowing themselves they had derailed their men and orphaned their children. At least Auntie Mei had had the sense not to have a child, though sometimes, during a sleepless night like this one, she entertained the thought of slipping away with a baby she could love. The world was vast; there had to be a place for a woman to raise a child as she wished. The babies—a hundred and thirty-one of them, and their parents, trusting yet vigilant—had protected Auntie Mei from herself. But who was going to protect her now? Not this baby, who was as defenseless as the others, yet she must protect him. From whom, though: his parents, who had no place for him in their hearts, or Auntie Mei, who had begun to imagine his life beyond the one month allocated to her? See, this is what you get for sitting up and muddling your head. Soon you’ll become a tiresome oldster like Paul, or a lonely woman like Chanel, telling stories to any available ear. You can go on talking and thinking about your mother and your grandmother and all those women before them, but the problem is, you don’t know them. If knowing someone makes that person stay with you forever, not knowing someone does the same trick: death does not take the dead away; it only makes them grow more deeply into you. No one would be able to stop her if she picked up Baby and walked out the door. She could turn herself into her grandmother, for whom sleep had become optional in the end; she could turn herself into her mother, too, eating little because it was Baby who needed nourishment. She could become a fugitive from this world that had kept her for too long, but this urge, coming as it often did in waves, no longer frightened her, as it had years ago. She was getting older, more forgetful, yet she was also closer to comprehending the danger of being herself. She had, unlike her mother and her grandmother, talked herself into being a woman with an ordinary fate. When she moved on to the next place, she would leave no mystery or damage behind; no one in this world would be disturbed by having known her.

Silences After dinner, nobody went home right away. I think we’d enjoyed the meal so much we hoped Elaine would serve us the whole thing all over again. These were people we’ve gotten to know a little from Elaine’s volunteer work—nobody from my work, nobody from the ad agency. We sat around in the living room describing the loudest sounds we’d ever heard. One said it was his wife’s voice when she told him she didn’t love him anymore and wanted a divorce. Another recalled the pounding of his heart when he suffered a coronary. Tia Jones had become a grandmother at the age of thirty-seven and hoped never again to hear anything so loud as her granddaughter crying in her sixteen-year-old daughter’s arms. Her husband, Ralph, said it hurt his ears whenever his brother opened his mouth in public, because his brother had Tourette’s syndrome and erupted with remarks like “I masturbate! Your penis smells good!” in front of perfect strangers on a bus or during a movie, or even in church. Young Chris Case reversed the direction and introduced the topic of silences. He said the most silent thing he’d ever heard was the land mine taking off his right leg outside Kabul, Afghanistan. As for other silences, nobody contributed. In fact, there came a silence now. Some of us hadn’t realized that Chris had lost a leg. He limped, but only slightly. I hadn’t even known he’d fought in Afghanistan. “A land mine?” I said. “Yes, sir. A land mine.” “Can we see it?” Deirdre said. “No, ma’am,” Chris said. “I don’t carry land mines around on my person.” “No! I mean your leg.” “It was blown off.” “I mean the part that’s still there!” “I’ll show you,” he said, “if you kiss it.” Shocked laughter. We started talking about the most ridiculous things we’d ever kissed. Nothing of interest. We’d all kissed only people, and only in the usual places. “All right, then,” Chris told Deirdre. “Here’s your chance for the conversation’s most unique entry.” “No, I don’t want to kiss your leg!” Although none of us showed it, I think we all felt a little irritated with Deirdre. We all wanted to see. Morton Sands was there, too, that night, and for the most part he’d managed to keep quiet. Now he said, “Jesus Christ, Deirdre.” “Oh, well. O.K.,” she said. Chris pulled up his right pant leg, bunching the cuff about halfway up his thigh, and detached his prosthesis, a device of chromium bars and plastic belts strapped to his knee, which was intact and swivelled upward horribly to present the puckered end of his leg. Deirdre got down on her bare knees before him, and he hitched forward in his seat—the couch; Ralph Jones was sitting beside him—to move the scarred stump within two inches of Deirdre’s face. Now she started to cry. Now we were all embarrassed, a little ashamed. For nearly a minute, we waited. Then Ralph Jones said, “Chris, I remember when I saw you fight two guys at once outside the Aces Tavern. No kidding,” Jones told the rest of us. “He went outside with these two guys and beat the crap out of both of them.” “I guess I could’ve given them a break,” Chris said. “They were both pretty drunk.” “Chris, you sure kicked some ass that night.” In the pocket of my shirt I had a wonderful Cuban cigar. I wanted to step outside with it. The dinner had been one of our best, and I wanted to top off the experience with a satisfying smoke. But you want to see how this sort of thing turns out. How often will you witness a woman kissing an amputation? Jones, however, had ruined everything by talking. He’d broken the spell. Chris worked the prosthesis back into place and tightened the straps and rearranged his pant leg. Deirdre stood up and wiped her eyes and smoothed her skirt and took her seat, and that was that. The outcome of all this was that Chris and Deirdre, about six months later, down at the courthouse, in the presence of very nearly the same group of friends, were married by a magistrate. Yes, they’re husband and wife. You and I know what goes on. ACCOMPLICES Another silence comes to mind. A couple of years ago, Elaine and I had dinner at the home of Miller Thomas, formerly the head of my agency in Manhattan. Right—he and his wife, Francesca, ended up out here, too, but considerably later than Elaine and I—once my boss, now a San Diego retiree. We finished two bottles of wine with dinner, maybe three bottles. After dinner, we had brandy. Before dinner, we had cocktails. We didn’t know one another particularly well, and maybe we used the liquor to rush past that fact. After the brandy, I started drinking Scotch, and Miller drank bourbon, and, although the weather was warm enough that the central air-conditioner was running, he pronounced it a cold night and lit a fire in his fireplace. It took only a squirt of fluid and the pop of a match to get an armload of sticks crackling and blazing, and then he laid on a couple of large chunks that he said were good, seasoned oak. “The capitalist at his forge,” Francesca said. At one point we were standing in the light of the flames, I and Miller Thomas, seeing how many books each man could balance on his out-flung arms, Elaine and Francesca loading them onto our hands in a test of equilibrium that both of us failed repeatedly. It became a test of strength. I don’t know who won. We called for more and more books, and our women piled them on until most of Miller’s library lay around us on the floor. He had a small Marsden Hartley canvas mounted above the mantel, a crazy, mostly blue landscape done in oil, and I said that perhaps that wasn’t the place for a painting like this one, so near the smoke and heat, such an expensive painting. And the painting was masterful, too, from what I could see of it by dim lamps and firelight, amid books scattered all over the floor. . . . Miller took offense. He said he’d paid for this masterpiece, he owned it, he could put it where it suited him. He moved very near the flames and took down the painting and turned to us, holding it before him, and declared that he could even, if he wanted, throw it in the fire and leave it there. “Is it art? Sure. But listen,” he said, “art doesn’t own it. My name ain’t Art.” He held the canvas flat like a tray, landscape up, and tempted the flames with it, thrusting it in and out. . . . And the strange thing is that I’d heard a nearly identical story about Miller Thomas and his beloved Hartley landscape some years before, about an evening very similar to this one, the drinks and wine and brandy and more drinks, the rowdy conversation, the scattering of books, and, finally, Miller thrusting this painting toward the flames and calling it his own property, and threatening to burn it. On that previous night, his guests had talked him down from the heights, and he’d hung the painting back in its place, but on our night—why?—none of us found a way to object as he added his property to the fuel and turned his back and walked away. A black spot appeared on the canvas and spread out in a sort of smoking puddle that gave rise to tiny flames. Miller sat in a chair across the living room, by the flickering window, and observed from that distance with a drink in his hand. Not a word, not a move, from any of us. The wooden frame popped marvellously in the silence while the great painting cooked away, first black and twisted, soon gray and fluttering, and then the fire had it all. ADMAN This morning I was assailed by such sadness at the velocity of life—the distance I’ve travelled from my own youth, the persistence of the old regrets, the new regrets, the ability of failure to freshen itself in novel forms—that I almost crashed the car. Getting out at the place where I do the job I don’t feel I’m very good at, I grabbed my briefcase too roughly and dumped half of its contents in my lap and half in the parking lot, and while gathering it all up I left my keys on the seat and locked the car manually—an old man’s habit—and trapped them in the Rav. In the office, I asked Shylene to call a locksmith and then to get me an appointment with my back man. In the upper right quadrant of my back I have a nerve that once in a while gets pinched. The T4 nerve. These nerves aren’t frail little ink lines; they’re cords, in fact, as thick as your pinkie finger. This one gets caught between tense muscles, and for days, even weeks, there’s not much to be done but take aspirin and get massages and visit the chiropractor. Down my right arm I feel a tingling, a numbness, sometimes a dull, sort of muffled torment, or else a shapeless, confusing pain. It’s a signal: it happens when I’m anxious about something. To my surprise, Shylene knew all about this something. Apparently, she finds time to be Googling her bosses, and she’d learned of an award I was about to receive in, of all places, New York—for an animated television commercial. The award goes to my old New York team, but I was the only one of us attending the ceremony, possibly the only one interested, so many years down the line. This little gesture of acknowledgment put the finishing touches on a depressing picture. The people on my team had gone on to other teams, fancier agencies, higher accomplishments. All I’d done in better than two decades was tread forward until I reached the limit of certain assumptions, and stepped off. Meanwhile, Shylene was oohing, gushing, like a proud nurse who expects you to marvel at all the horrible procedures the hospital has in store for you. I said to her, “Thanks, thanks.” When I entered the reception area, and throughout this transaction, Shylene was wearing a flashy sequinned carnival mask. I didn’t ask why. Our office environment is part of the New Wave. The whole agency works under one gigantic big top, like a circus—not crowded, quite congenial, all of it surrounding a spacious break-time area, with pinball machines and a basketball hoop, and every Friday during the summer months we have a happy hour with free beer from a keg. In New York, I made commercials. In San Diego, I write and design glossy brochures, mostly for a group of Western resorts where golf is played and horses take you along bridle paths. Don’t get me wrong—California’s full of beautiful spots; it’s a pleasure to bring them to the attention of people who might enjoy them. Just, please, not with a badly pinched nerve. When I can’t stand it, I take the day off and visit the big art museum in Balboa Park. Today, after the locksmith got me back into my car, I drove to the museum and sat in on part of a lecture in one of its side rooms, a woman outsider artist raving, “Art is man and man is art!” I listened for five minutes, and what little of it she managed to make comprehensible didn’t even merit being called shallow. Just the same, her paintings were slyly designed, intricately patterned, and coherent. I wandered from wall to wall, taking some of it in, not much. But looking at art for an hour or so always changes the way I see things afterward—this day, for instance, a group of mentally handicapped adults on a tour of the place, with their twisted, hovering hands and cocked heads, moving among the works like cheap cinema zombies, but good zombies, zombies with minds and souls and things to keep them interested. And outside, where they normally have a lot of large metal sculptures—the grounds were being dug up and reconstructed—a dragline shovel nosing the rubble monstrously, and a woman and a child watching, motionless, the little boy standing on a bench with his smile and sideways eyes and his mother beside him, holding his hand, both so still, like a photograph of American ruin. Next, I had a session with a chiropractor dressed up as an elf. It seemed the entire staff at the medical complex near my house were costumed for Halloween, and while I waited out front in the car for my appointment, the earliest one I could get that day, I saw a Swiss milkmaid coming back from lunch, then a witch with a green face, then a sunburst-orange superhero. Then I had the session with the chiropractor in his tights and drooping cap. As for me? My usual guise. The masquerade continues. FAREWELL “I’ve decided to work from home today.”Buy the print » Elaine got a wall phone for the kitchen, a sleek blue one that wears its receiver like a hat, with a caller-I.D. readout on its face just below the keypad. While I eyeballed this instrument, having just come in from my visit with the chiropractor, a brisk, modest tone began, and the tiny screen showed ten digits I didn’t recognize. My inclination was to scorn it, like any other unknown. But this was the first call, the inaugural message. As soon as I touched the receiver I wondered if I’d regret this, if I was holding a mistake in my hand, if I was pulling this mistake to my head and saying “Hello” to it. The caller was my first wife, Virginia, or Ginny, as I always called her. We were married long ago, in our early twenties, and put a stop to it after three crazy years. Since then, we hadn’t spoken, we’d had no reason to, but now we had one. Ginny was dying. Her voice came faintly. She told me the doctors had closed the book on her, she’d ordered her affairs, the good people from hospice were in attendance. Before she ended this earthly transit, as she called it, Ginny wanted to shed any kind of bitterness against certain people, certain men, especially me. She said how much she’d been hurt, and how badly she wanted to forgive me, but she didn’t know whether she could or not—she hoped she could—and I assured her, from the abyss of a broken heart, that I hoped so, too, that I hated my infidelities and my lies about the money, and the way I’d kept my boredom secret, and my secrets in general, and Ginny and I talked, after forty years of silence, about the many other ways I’d stolen her right to the truth. In the middle of this, I began wondering, most uncomfortably, in fact with a dizzy, sweating anxiety, if I’d made a mistake—if this wasn’t my first wife, Ginny, no, but rather my second wife, Jennifer, often called Jenny. Because of the weakness of her voice and my own humming shock at the news, also the situation around her as she tried to speak to me on this very important occasion—folks coming and going, and the sounds of a respirator, I supposed—now, fifteen minutes into this call, I couldn’t remember if she’d actually said her name when I picked up the phone and I suddenly didn’t know which set of crimes I was regretting, wasn’t sure if this dying farewell clobbering me to my knees in true repentance beside the kitchen table was Virginia’s, or Jennifer’s. “This is hard,” I said. “Can I put the phone down a minute?” I heard her say O.K. The house felt empty. “Elaine?” I called. Nothing. I wiped my face with a dishrag and took off my blazer and hung it on a chair and called out Elaine’s name one more time and then picked up the receiver again. There was nobody there. Somewhere inside it, the phone had preserved the caller’s number, of course, Ginny’s number or Jenny’s, but I didn’t look for it. We’d had our talk, and Ginny or Jenny, whichever, had recognized herself in my frank apologies, and she’d been satisfied—because, after all, both sets of crimes had been the same. I was tired. What a day. I called Elaine on her cell phone. We agreed she might as well stay at the Budget Inn on the East Side. She volunteered out there, teaching adults to read, and once in a while she got caught late and stayed over. Good. I could lock all three locks on the door and call it a day. I didn’t mention the previous call. I turned in early. I dreamed of a wild landscape—elephants, dinosaurs, bat caves, strange natives, and so on. I woke, couldn’t go back to sleep, put on a long terry-cloth robe over my p.j.’s and slipped into my loafers and went walking. People in bathrobes stroll around here at all hours, but not often, I think, without a pet on a leash. Ours is a good neighborhood—a Catholic church and a Mormon one, and a posh town-house development with much open green space, and, on our side of the street, some pretty nice smaller homes. I wonder if you’re like me, if you collect and squirrel away in your soul certain odd moments when the Mystery winks at you, when you walk in your bathrobe and tasselled loafers, for instance, well out of your neighborhood and among a lot of closed shops, and you approach your very faint reflection in a window with words above it. The sign said “Sky and Celery.” Closer, it read “Ski and Cyclery.” I headed home. WIDOW I was having lunch one day with my friend Tom Ellis, a journalist—just catching up. He said that he was writing a two-act drama based on interviews he’d taped while gathering material for an article on the death penalty, two interviews in particular. First, he’d spent an afternoon with a death-row inmate in Virginia, the murderer William Donald Mason, a name not at all famous here in California, and I don’t know why I remember it. Mason was scheduled to die the next day, twelve years after killing a guard he’d taken hostage during a bank robbery. Other than his last meal, of steak, green beans, and a baked potato, which would be served to him the following noon, Mason knew of no future outcomes to worry about and seemed relaxed and content. Ellis quizzed him about his life before his arrest, his routine there at the prison, his views on the death penalty—Mason was against it—and his opinion as to an afterlife—Mason was for it. The prisoner talked with admiration about his wife, whom he’d met and married some years after landing on death row. She was the cousin of a fellow-inmate. She waited tables in a sports bar—great tips. She liked reading, and she’d introduced her murderer husband to the works of Charles Dickens and Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway. She was studying for a Realtor’s license. Mason had already said goodbye to his wife. The couple had agreed to get it all out of the way a full week ahead of the execution, to spend several happy hours together and part company well out of the shadow of Mason’s last day. Ellis said that he’d felt a fierce, unexpected kinship with this man so close to the end, because, as Mason himself pointed out, this was the last time he’d be introduced to a stranger, except for the people who would arrange him on the gurney the next day and set him up for his injection. Tom Ellis was the last new person he’d meet, in other words, who wasn’t about to kill him. And, in fact, everything proceeded according to the schedule and, about eighteen hours after Ellis talked with him, William Mason was dead. A week later, Ellis interviewed the new widow, Mrs. Mason, and learned that much of what she’d told her husband was false. Ellis located her in Norfolk, working not in any kind of sports bar but, instead, in a basement sex emporium near the waterfront, in a one-on-one peepshow. In order to talk to her, Ellis had to pay twenty dollars and descend a narrow stairway, lit with purple bulbs, and sit in a chair before a curtained window. He was shocked when the curtain vanished upward to reveal the woman already completely nude, sitting on a stool in a padded booth. Then it was her turn to be shocked, when Ellis introduced himself as a man who’d shared an hour or two of her husband’s last full day on earth. Together, they spoke of the prisoner’s wishes and dreams, his happiest memories and his childhood grief, the kinds of things a man shares only with his wife. Her face, though severe, was pretty, and she displayed her parts to Tom unself-consciously, yet without the protection of anonymity. She wept, she laughed, she shouted, she whispered all of this into a telephone handset that she held to her head, while her free hand gestured in the air or touched the glass between them. As for having told so many lies to the man she’d married—that was one of the things she laughed about. She seemed to assume that anybody else would have done the same. In addition to her bogus employment and her imaginary studies in real estate, she’d endowed herself with a religious soul and joined a nonexistent church. Thanks to all her fabrications, William Donald Mason had died a proud and happy husband. And, just as he’d been surprised by his sudden intimacy with the condemned killer, my friend felt very close to the widow, because they were talking to each other about life and death while she displayed her nakedness before him, sitting on the stool with her red spike-heeled pumps planted wide apart on the floor. I asked him if they’d ended up making love, and he said no, but he’d wanted to, he certainly had, and he was convinced that the naked widow had felt the same, though you weren’t allowed to touch the girls in those places, and this dialogue, in fact both of them—the death-row interview and the interview with the naked widow—had taken place through glass partitions made to withstand any kind of passionate assault. At the time, the idea of telling her what he wanted had seemed terrible. Now he regretted his shyness. In the play, as he described it for me, the second act would end differently. Before long, we wandered into a discussion of the difference between repentance and regret. You repent the things you’ve done, and regret the chances you let get away. Then, as sometimes happens in a San Diego café—more often than you’d think—we were interrupted by a beautiful young woman selling roses. ORPHAN The lunch with Tom Ellis took place a couple of years ago. I don’t suppose he ever wrote the play; it was just a notion he was telling me about. It came to mind today because this afternoon I attended the memorial service of an artist friend of mine, a painter named Tony Fido, who once told me about a similar experience. Tony found a cell phone on the ground near his home in National City, just south of here. He told me about this the last time I saw him, a couple of months before he disappeared, or went out of communication. First he went out of communication, then he was deceased. But when he told me this story there was no hint of any of that. Tony noticed the cell phone lying under an oleander bush as he walked around his neighborhood. He picked it up and continued his stroll, and before long felt it vibrating in his pocket. When he answered, he found himself talking to the wife of the owner—the owner’s widow, actually, who explained that she’d been calling the number every thirty minutes or so since her husband’s death, not twenty-four hours before. Her husband had been killed the previous afternoon in an accident at the intersection where Tony had found the cell phone. An old woman in a Cadillac had run him down. At the moment of impact, the device had been torn from his hand. The police said that they hadn’t noticed any phone around the scene. It hadn’t been among the belongings she’d collected at the morgue. “I knew he lost it right there,” she told Tony, “because he was talking to me at the very second when it happened.” Tony offered to get in his car and deliver the phone to her personally, and she gave him her address in Lemon Grove, nine miles distant. When he got there he discovered that the woman was only twenty-two and quite attractive, and that she and her husband had been going through a divorce. At this point in the telling, I think I knew where his story was headed. “She came after me. I told her, ‘You’re either from Heaven or from Hell.’ It turned out she was from Hell.” Whenever he talked, Tony kept his hands moving—grabbing and rearranging small things on the tabletop—while his head rocked from side to side and back and forth. Sometimes he referred to a “force of rhythm” in his paintings. He often spoke of “motion” in the work. I didn’t know much about Tony’s background. He was in his late forties but seemed younger. I met him at the Balboa Park museum, where he appeared at my shoulder while I looked at an Edward Hopper painting of a Cape Cod gas station. He offered his critique, which was lengthy, meticulous, and scathing—and which was focussed on technique, only on technique—and spoke of his contempt for all painters, and finished by saying, “I wish Picasso was alive. I’d challenge him—he could do one of mine and I could do one of his.” “You’re a painter yourself.” “A better painter than this guy,” he said of Edward Hopper. “Well, whose work would you say is any good?” “The only painter I admire is God. He’s my biggest influence.” We began having coffee together two or three times a month, always, I have to admit, at Tony’s initiation. Usually I drove to his lively, dishevelled Hispanic neighborhood to see him, there in National City. I like primitive art, and I like folktales, so I enjoyed visiting his rambling old home, where he lived surrounded by his paintings, like an orphan king in a cluttered castle. “Permission to speak in rhyming couplets, sir.”Buy the print » The house had been in his family since 1939. For a while, it was a boarding house—a dozen bedrooms, each with its own sink. “Damn place has a jinx or whammy: First, Spiro—Spiro watched it till he died. Mom watched it till she died. My sister watched it till she died. Now I’ll be here till I die,” he said, hosting me shirtless, his hairy torso dabbed all over with paint. Talking so fast I could rarely follow, he did seem deranged. But blessed, decidedly so, with a self-deprecating and self-orienting humor that the genuinely mad seem to have misplaced. What to make of somebody like that? “Richards in the Washington Post,” he once said, “compared me to Melville.” I have no idea who Richards was. Or who Spiro was. Tony never tired of his voluble explanations, his self-exegesis—the works almost coded, as if to fool or distract the unworthy. They weren’t the child drawings of your usual schizophrenic outsider artist, but efforts a little more skillful, on the order of tattoo art, oil on canvases around four by six feet in size, crowded with images but highly organized, all on Biblical themes, mostly dire and apocalyptic, and all with the titles printed neatly right on them. One of his works, for instance—three panels depicting the end of the world and the advent of Heaven—was called “Mystery Babylon Mother of Harlots Revelation 17:1-7.” This period when I was seeing a bit of Tony Fido coincided with an era in the world of my unconscious, an era when I was troubled by the dreams I had at night. They were long and epic, detailed and violent and colorful. They were exhausting. I couldn’t account for them. The only medication I took was something to bring down my blood pressure, and it wasn’t new. I made sure I didn’t take food just before going to bed. I avoided sleeping on my back, steered clear of disturbing novels and TV shows. For a month, maybe six weeks, I dreaded sleep. Once, I dreamed of Tony—I defended him against an angry mob, keeping the seething throng at bay with a butcher knife. Often, I woke up short of breath, shaking, my heartbeat rattling my ribs, and I cured my nerves with a solitary walk, no matter the hour. And once—maybe the night I dreamed about Tony, I don’t remember—I went walking and had the kind of moment or visitation I treasure, when the flow of life twists and untwists, all in a blink—think of a taut ribbon flashing: I heard a young man’s voice in the parking lot of the Mormon church in the dark night telling someone, “I didn’t bark. That wasn’t me. I didn’t bark.” I never found out how things turned out between Tony and the freshly widowed twenty-two-year-old. I’m pretty sure it went no further, and there was no second encounter, certainly no ongoing affair—because he more than once complained, “I can’t find a woman, none. I’m under some kind of a damn spell.” He believed in spells and whammies and such, in angels and mermaids, omens, sorcery, wind-borne voices, in messages and patterns. All through his house were scattered twigs and feathers possessing a mysterious significance, rocks that had spoken to him, stumps of driftwood whose faces he recognized. And, in any direction, his canvases, like windows opening onto lightning and smoke, ranks of crimson demons and flying angels, gravestones on fire, and scrolls, chalices, torches, swords. Last week, a woman named Rebecca Stamos, somebody I’d never heard of, called me to say that our mutual friend Tony Fido was no more. He’d killed himself. As she put it, “He took his life.” For two seconds, the phrase meant nothing to me. “Took it,” I said. . . . Then, “Oh, my goodness.” “Yes, I’m afraid he committed suicide.” “I don’t want to know how. Don’t tell me how.” Honestly, I can’t imagine why I said that. MEMORIAL A week ago Friday—nine days ago—the eccentric religious painter Tony Fido stopped his car on Interstate 8, about sixty miles east of San Diego, on a bridge above a deep, deep ravine, and climbed over the railing and stepped into the air. He mailed a letter beforehand to Rebecca Stamos, not to explain himself but only to say goodbye and pass along the phone numbers of some friends. Sunday I attended Tony’s memorial service, for which Rebecca Stamos had reserved the band room of the middle school where she teaches. We sat in a circle, with cups and saucers on our laps, in a tiny grove of music stands, and volunteered, one by one, our memories of Tony Fido. There were only five of us: our hostess, Rebecca, plain and stout, in a sleeveless blouse and a skirt that reached down to her white tennis shoes; myself in the raiment of my order, the blue blazer, khaki chinos, tasselled loafers; two middle-aged women of the sort to own a couple of small obnoxious dogs—they called Tony “Anthony”; a chubby young man in a green jumpsuit—some kind of mechanic—sweating. Tony’s neighbors? Family? None. Only the pair of ladies who’d arrived together actually knew each other. None of the rest of us had ever met before. These were friendships, or acquaintances, that Tony had kept one by one. He’d met us all in the same way—he’d materialized beside us at an art museum, an outdoor market, a doctor’s waiting room, and he’d begun to talk. I was the only one of us even aware he devoted all his time to painting canvases. The others thought he owned some kind of business—plumbing or exterminating or looking after private swimming pools. One believed he came from Greece; others assumed Mexico, but I’m sure his family was Armenian, long established in San Diego County. Rather than memorializing him, we found ourselves asking, “Who the hell was this guy?” Rebecca had this much about him: while he was still in his teens, Tony’s mother had killed herself. “He mentioned it more than once,” Rebecca said. “It was always on his mind.” To the rest of us this came as new information. Of course, it troubled us to learn that his mother had taken her own life, too. Had she jumped? Tony hadn’t told, and Rebecca hadn’t asked. With little to offer about Tony in the way of biography, I shared some remarks of his that had stuck in my thoughts. “I couldn’t get into ritzy art schools,” he told me once. “Best thing that ever happened to me. It’s dangerous to be taught art.” And he said, “On my twenty-sixth birthday, I quit signing my work. Anybody who can paint like that, have at it, and take the credit.” He got a kick out of showing me a passage in his hefty black Bible—first book of Samuel, Chapter 6?—where the idolatry of the Philistines earns them a plague of hemorrhoids. “Don’t tell me God doesn’t have a sense of humor.” And another of his insights, one he shared with me several times: “We live in a catastrophic universe—not a universe of gradualism.” That one had always gone right past me. Now it sounded ominous, prophetic. Had I missed a message? A warning? The man in the green jumpsuit, the garage mechanic, reported that Tony had plunged from our nation’s highest concrete-beam bridge down into Pine Valley Creek, a flight of four hundred and forty feet. The span, completed in 1974 and named the Nello Irwin Greer Memorial Bridge, was the first in the United States to be built using, according to the mechanic, “the cast-in-place segmental balanced cantilever method.” I wrote it down on a memo pad. I can’t recall the mechanic’s name. His breast-tag said “Ted,” but he introduced himself as someone else. Anne and her friend, whose name also slipped past me—the pair of women—cornered me afterward. They seemed to think I should be the one to take final possession of a three-ring binder full of recipes that Tony had loaned them—the collected recipes of Tony’s mother. I determined I would give it to Elaine. She’s a wonderful cook, but not as a regular thing, because nobody likes to cook for two. Too much work and too many leftovers. I told them she’d be glad to get the book. The binder was too big for any of my pockets. I thought of asking for a bag, but I failed to ask. I didn’t know what to do with it but carry it home in my hands and deliver it to my wife. Elaine was sitting at the kitchen table, before her a cup of black coffee and half a sandwich on a plate. I set the notebook on the table next to her snack. She stared at it. “Oh,” she said. “From your painter.” She sat me down beside her and we went through the notebook page by page, side by side. Elaine: she’s petite, lithe, quite smart; short gray hair, no makeup. A good companion. At any moment—the very next second—she could be dead. I want to depict this book carefully, so imagine holding it in your hands, a three-ring binder of bright-red plastic weighing about the same as a full dinner plate, and now setting it in front of you on the table. When you open it, you find a pink title page, “Recipes. Caesarina Fido,” covering a two-inch thickness of white college-ruled three-hole paper, the first inch or so the usual—casseroles and pies and salad dressings, every aspect of breakfast, lunch, and supper, all written in blue ballpoint. Halfway through, Tony’s mother introduces ink of other colors, mostly green, red, and purple, but also pink, and a yellow that’s hard to make out; and, as these colors come along, her penmanship enters a kind of havoc, the letters swell and shrink, several pages big and loopy, leaning to the right, and then, for the next many pages, leaning to the left, then back the other way; and here, where these wars and changes begin, and for better than a hundred pages, all the way to the end, the recipes are only for cocktails. Every kind of cocktail. Earlier that afternoon, as Anne handed the binder over to me at Tony’s memorial, she made a curious remark. “Anthony spoke very highly of you. He said you were his best friend.” I thought it was a joke, but Anne meant this seriously. Tony’s best friend? I was confused. I’m still confused. I hardly knew him. CASANOVA When I returned to New York City to pick up my prize at the American Advertisers Awards, I’m not sure I expected to enjoy myself. But on the second day, killing time before the ceremony, walking north through midtown in my dark ceremonial suit and trench coat, skirting the Park, strolling south again, feeling the pulse and listening to the traffic noise rising among high buildings, I had a homecoming. The day was sunny, fine for walking, brisk, and getting brisker—and, in fact, as I cut a diagonal through a little plaza somewhere above Fortieth Street, the last autumn leaves were swept up from the pavement and thrown around my head, and a sudden misty quality in the atmosphere above seemed to solidify into a ceiling both dark and luminous, and the passersby hunched into their collars, and, two minutes later, the gusts settled into a wind, not hard but steady and cold, and my hands dove into my coat pockets. A bit of rain speckled the pavement. Random snowflakes spiralled in the air. All around me, people seemed to be evacuating the scene, while across the square a vender shouted that he was closing his cart and you could have his wares for practically nothing, and for no reason I could have named I bought two of his rat dogs with everything and a cup of doubtful coffee and then learned the reason—they were wonderful. I nearly ate the napkin. New York! Once, I lived here. Went to Columbia University, studying history first, then broadcast journalism. Worked for a couple of pointless years at the Post, and then for thirteen tough but prosperous years at Castle and Forbes on Fifty-fourth, just off Madison Avenue. And then took my insomnia, my afternoon headaches, my doubts, and my antacid tablets to San Diego and lost them in the Pacific Ocean. New York and I didn’t quite fit. I knew it the whole time. Some of my Columbia classmates came from faraway places like Iowa and Nevada, as I had come a shorter way from New Hampshire, and after graduation they’d been absorbed into Manhattan and had lived there ever since. I didn’t last. I always say, “It was never my town.” Today it was all mine. Today I was its proprietor. With my overcoat wide open and the wind in my hair, I walked around and for an hour or so presided over the bits of litter in the air—so much less than thirty years ago!—and the citizens bent against the weather, and the light inside the restaurants, and the people at small tables looking at one another’s faces and talking. The white flakes began to stick. By the time I entered Trump Tower, I’d had a long, hard, wet walk. I repaired myself in the rest room and found the right floor. At the ceremony, my table was near the front—round, clothed in burgundy, and surrounded by eight of us, the other seven much younger than I, a lively bunch, fun and full of wisecracks. And they seemed impressed to be sitting with me, and made sure I sat where I could see. All that was the good part. “The starred menu items are available for celebrities only.”Buy the print » Halfway through dessert, the nerve in my back began to act up, and by the time I heard my name and started toward the podium my right shoulder blade felt as if it were pressed against a hissing old New York steam-heat radiator. At the head of the vast room, I held the medallion in my hand—that’s what it was, rather than a trophy; an inscribed medallion three inches in diameter, good for a paperweight—and thanked a list of names I’d memorized, omitted any other remarks, and got back to my table just as another pain seized me, this one in the region of my bowels, and now I repented my curbside lunch, my delicious New York hot dogs, especially the second one, and, without sitting down or even making an excuse, I let this bout of indigestion carry me out of the room and down the halls to the men’s lavatory, where I hardly had time to fumble the medallion into my lapel pocket and get my jacket on the hook. I’d sat down with my intestines in flames, first my body bearing this insult, and then my soul insulted, too, when someone came in and chose the stall next to mine. Our public toilets are just that—too public; the walls don’t reach the floor. This other man and I could see each other’s feet. Or, at any rate, our black shoes, and the cuffs of our dark trousers. After a minute, his hand laid on the floor between us, there at the border between his space and mine, a square of toilet paper with an obscene proposition written on it, in words large and plain enough that I could read them whether I wanted to or not. In pain, I laughed. Not out loud. I heard a small sigh from the next stall. By hunching down into my own embrace and staring hard at my feet, I tried to make myself go away. I didn’t acknowledge his overture, and he didn’t leave. He must have taken it that I had him under consideration. As long as I stayed, he had reason to hope. And I couldn’t leave yet. My bowels churned and smoldered. Renegade signals from my spinal nerve hammered my shoulder and the full length of my right arm, down to the marrow. The awards ceremony seemed to have ended. The men’s room came to life—the door whooshing open, the run of voices coming in. Throats and faucets and footfalls. The spin of the paper-towel dispenser. Somewhere in here, a hand descended to the note on the floor, fingers touched it, raised it away. Soon after that the man, the toilet Casanova, was no longer beside me. I stayed as I was, for how long I couldn’t say. There were echoes. Silence. The urinals flushing themselves. I raised myself upright, pulled my clothing together, made my way to the sinks. One other man remained in the place. He stood at the sink beside mine as our faucets ran. I washed my hands. He washed his hands. He was tall, with a distinctive head—wispy colorless hair like a baby’s, and a skeletal face with thick red lips. I’d have known him anywhere. “Carl Zane!” He smiled in a small way. “Wrong. I’m Marshall Zane. I’m Carl’s son.” “Sure, of course—he would have aged, too!” This encounter had me going in circles. I’d finished washing my hands, and now I started washing them again. I forgot to introduce myself. “You look just like your dad,” I said. “Only twenty-five years ago. Are you here for the awards night?” He nodded. “I’m with the Sextant Group.” “You followed in his footsteps.” “I did. I even worked for Castle and Forbes for a couple of years.” “How do you like that? And how’s Carl doing? Is he here tonight?” “He passed away three years ago. Went to sleep one night and never woke up.” “Oh. Oh, no.” I had a moment—I have them sometimes—when the surroundings seemed bereft of any facts, and not even the smallest physical gesture felt possible. After the moment had passed, I said, “I’m sorry to hear that. He was a nice guy.” “At least it was painless,” the son of Carl Zane said. “And, as far as anyone knows, he went to bed happy that night.” We were talking to each other’s reflection in the broad mirror. I made sure I didn’t look elsewhere—at his trousers, his shoes. But, for this occasion, we men, every one of us, had dressed in dark trousers and black shoes. “Well . . . enjoy your evening,” the young man said. I thanked him and said good night, and, as he tossed a wadded paper towel at the receptacle and disappeared out the door, I’m afraid I added, “Tell your father I said hello.” MERMAID As I trudged up Fifth Avenue after this miserable interlude, I carried my shoulder like a bushel-bag of burning kindling and could hardly stay upright the three blocks to my hotel. It was really snowing now, and it was Saturday night, the sidewalk was crowded, people came at me, forcing themselves against the weather, their shoulders hunched, their coats pinched shut, flakes battering their faces, and though the faces were dark I felt I saw into their eyes. I came awake in the unfamiliar room I didn’t know how much later, and, if this makes sense, it wasn’t the pain in my shoulder that woke me but its departure. The episode had passed. I lay bathed in relief. Beyond my window, a thick layer of snow covered the ledge. I became aware of a hush of anticipation, a tremendous surrounding absence. I got out of bed, dressed in my clothes, and went out to look at the city. It was, I think, around 1 A.M. Snow six inches deep had fallen. Park Avenue looked smooth and soft—not one vehicle had disturbed its surface. The city was almost completely stopped, its very few sounds muffled yet perfectly distinct from one another: a rumbling snowplow somewhere, a car’s horn, a man on another street shouting several faint syllables. I tried counting up the years since I’d seen snow. Eleven or twelve—Denver, and it had been exactly the same, exactly like this. One lone taxi glided up Park Avenue through the virgin white, and I hailed it and asked the driver to find any restaurant open for business. I looked out the back window at the brilliant silences falling from the street lamps, and at our fresh black tracks disappearing into the infinite—the only proof of Park Avenue; I’m not sure how the cabbie kept to the road. He took me to a small diner off Union Square, where I had a wonderful breakfast among a handful of miscellaneous wanderers like myself, New Yorkers with their large, historic faces, every one of whom, delivered here without an explanation, seemed invaluable. I paid and left and set out walking back toward midtown. I’d bought a pair of weatherproof dress shoes just before leaving San Diego, and I was glad. I looked for places where I was the first to walk and kicked at the powdery snow. A piano playing a Latin tune drew me through a doorway into an atmosphere of sadness: a dim tavern, a stale smell, the piano’s weary melody, and a single customer, an ample, attractive woman with abundant blond hair. She wore an evening gown. A light shawl covered her shoulders. She seemed poised and self-possessed, though it was possible, also, that she was weeping. I let the door close behind me. The bartender, a small old black man, raised his eyebrows, and I said, “Scotch rocks, Red Label.” Talking, I felt discourteous. The piano played in the gloom of the farthest corner. I recognized the melody as a Mexican traditional called “Maria Elena.” I couldn’t see the musician at all. In front of the piano a big tenor saxophone rested upright on a stand. With no one around to play it, it seemed like just another of the personalities here: the invisible pianist, the disenchanted old bartender, the big glamorous blonde, the shipwrecked, solitary saxophone. And the man who’d walked here through the snow . . . And as soon as the name of the song popped into my head I thought I heard a voice say, “Her name is Maria Elena.” The scene had a moonlit, black-and-white quality. Ten feet away, at her table, the blond woman waited, her shoulders back, her face raised. She lifted one hand and beckoned me with her fingers. She was weeping. The lines of her tears sparkled on her cheeks. “I am a prisoner here,” she said. I took the chair across from her and watched her cry. I sat upright, one hand on the table’s surface and the other around my drink. I felt the ecstasy of a dancer, but I kept still. WHIT My name would mean nothing to you, but there’s a very good chance you’re familiar with my work. Among the many TV ads I wrote and directed, you’ll remember one in particular. In this animated thirty-second spot, you see a brown bear chasing a gray rabbit. They come one after the other over a hill toward the view—the rabbit is cornered, he’s crying, the bear comes to him—the rabbit reaches into his waistcoat pocket and pulls out a dollar bill and gives it to the bear. The bear looks at this gift, sits down, stares into space. The music stops, there’s no sound, nothing is said, and, right there, the little narrative ends, on a note of complete uncertainty. It’s an advertisement for a banking chain. It sounds ridiculous, I know, but that’s only if you haven’t seen it. If you’ve seen it, the way it was rendered, then you know that it was a very unusual advertisement. Because it referred, really, to nothing at all, and yet it was actually very moving. Advertisements don’t try to get you to fork over your dough by tugging irrelevantly at your heartstrings, not as a rule. But this one broke the rules, and it worked. It brought the bank many new customers. And it excited a lot of commentary and won several awards—every award I ever won, in fact, I won for that ad. It ran in both halves of the twenty-second Super Bowl, and people still remember it. You don’t get awards personally. They go to the team. To the agency. But your name attaches to the project as a matter of workplace lore—“Whit did that one.” (And that would be me, Bill Whitman.) “Yes, the one with the rabbit and the bear was Whit’s.” Credit goes first of all to the banking firm who let this strange message go out to potential customers, who sought to start a relationship with a gesture so cryptic. It was better than cryptic—mysterious, untranslatable. I think it pointed to orderly financial exchange as the basis of harmony. Money tames the beast. Money is peace. Money is civilization. The end of the story is money. I won’t mention the name of the bank. If you don’t remember the name, then it wasn’t such a good ad after all. If you watched any prime-time television in the nineteen-eighties, you’ve almost certainly seen several other ads I wrote or directed or both. I crawled out of my twenties leaving behind a couple of short, unhappy marriages, and then I found Elaine. Twenty-five years last June, and two daughters. Have I loved my wife? We’ve gotten along. We’ve never felt like congratulating ourselves. I’m just shy of sixty-three. Elaine’s fifty-two but seems older. Not in her looks but in her attitude of complacency. She lacks fire. Seems interested mainly in our two girls. She keeps in close contact with them. They’re both grown. They’re harmless citizens. They aren’t beautiful or clever. Before the girls started grade school, we left New York and headed West in stages, a year in Denver (too much winter), another in Phoenix (too hot), and finally San Diego. San Diego. What a wonderful city. It’s a bit more crowded each year, but still. Completely wonderful. Never regretted coming here, not for an instant. And financially it all worked out. If we’d stayed in New York I’d have made a lot more money, but we’d have needed a lot more, too. Last night Elaine and I lay in bed watching TV, and I asked her what she remembered. Not much. Less than I. We have a very small TV that sits on a dresser across the room. Keeping it going provides an excuse for lying awake in bed. I note that I’ve lived longer in the past, now, than I can expect to live in the future. I have more to remember than I have to look forward to. Memory fades, not much of the past stays, and I wouldn’t mind forgetting a lot more of it. Once in a while, I lie there as the television runs, and I read something wild and ancient from one of several collections of folktales I own. Apples that summon sea maidens, eggs that fulfill any wish, and pears that make people grow long noses that fall off again. Then sometimes I get up and don my robe and go out into our quiet neighborhood looking for a magic thread, a magic sword, a magic horse.

I was almost twelve years old, going into the fifth year of barneskole. At times it was as though the girls really hated me, considered me some sort of scum; at others it was the opposite—not only did they want to talk to me but at the class parties we had begun to arrange, at one another’s houses and at school, they also wanted to dance with me. My attitude toward them was also ambivalent, at least as far as the girls in my class were concerned. On the one hand, I knew them so well I was completely indifferent toward them; on the other hand, they had started changing—the bulges under their sweaters were growing, their hips were widening, and they were behaving differently. They had risen above us: suddenly the boys they looked at were from two or three classes up. With our high-pitched voices, our more or less furtive glances as we admired all the attributes they now possessed, we were no more than air to them. But, no matter how important they were, they knew nothing about the world they were moving toward. What did they know about men and women and desire? Had they read Wilbur Smith, where women were taken by force under stormy skies? Had they read Ken Follett, where a man shaves a woman’s pussy while she lies in a foam-filled bathtub with her eyes closed? Had they read “Insect Summer,” by Knut Faldbakken, the passage that I knew by heart, when the boy takes the girl’s panties off in the hay? Had they ever got their hands on a porn magazine? And what did they know about music? They liked what everyone liked—the Kids and all the other crap on the top-ten lists. It meant nothing to them, not really; they had no idea what music was or what it could be. They could barely dress; they turned up at school wearing the strangest combinations of clothes. And then they were looking down on me? Every Friday we had something we called “Class Top of the Pops.” Six students brought a song each and we all voted for our favorite one. Mine always came in last, whatever I played. Led Zeppelin, Queen, Wings, the Beatles, the Police, the Jam, Skids—the result was the same, only one or two votes, last. I knew that my classmates were voting against me and not the music. They weren’t really listening to the music. This irritated me beyond endurance. I complained to my older brother Yngve, and he not only understood how irritating it was but also came up with a way to trick them. The Kids’ second record hadn’t been released yet. One Friday I took to school the Aller Værste!’s first LP, “Materialtretthet,” which Yngve had bought a few days before, and said that I had an advance copy of the Kids’ new album. When the first notes of the band’s first song sounded in the classroom, there were mumbles of appreciation and mounting enthusiasm, which culminated when the vote was taken, and it turned out that the Aller Værste! had won, hands down. How the triumph shone in my eyes as I stood and informed them that they had not voted for the Kids. Of course, I never heard the last of it. I was conceited, I thought I was quite something, I always had to like weird things, instead of what everyone else liked. That wasn’t true, though. Surely it wasn’t my fault that I liked good music? And I was learning more and more about it, thanks to Yngve and his music magazines and the records he played me. He also taught me chords on the guitar, and when he wasn’t at home I would play by myself with the black Gibson plectrum in my hand and the black Fender strap over my shoulder. The only person on my wavelength at school was Dag Magne. We were mostly up at his house, playing records and trying to imitate the songs on his twelve-string guitar or talking about girls or the band we were going to start, especially what we were going to call it. He wanted it to be Dag Magne’s Anonymous Disciples; I wanted it to be Blood Clot. They were equally good, we agreed, and we didn’t need to make a decision until the time was ripe and we were performing on a stage. In this way the winter passed, with the first class parties, where we played post office and slow-danced, round and round the floor with girls we knew better than our sisters, and my head almost exploded when I held Anne Lisbet’s body so close to mine. The fragrance of her hair, the sparkling eyes that were bursting with life. And, oh, the little breasts under the thin white blouse. Wasn’t that a fantastic feeling? It was completely new, unknown for all these years, but, now I knew it, now I wanted to go there again. Spring came, with its light, which held the passage to night open a little longer each day, and with its cold rain, which caused the snow to slump and dwindle. One of those stormy March mornings, we had gym class. In the changing room afterward, the ventilation grilles howled and wheezed as though the building were alive, a huge beast full of rooms, corridors, and shafts that had settled here beside the school and in its despondency sang lonely laments. Or perhaps it was the sounds that were alive. I took my towel and went into the shower, which was already hot with steam. I found a place among the throng of pale, almost marble-white boys’ bodies, and was engulfed by the hot water that first hit the top of my head and then ran in steady streams down my face and chest, neck and back. My hair stuck to my forehead and I closed my eyes. That was when someone shouted. “Tor’s got a hard-on! Tor’s got a hard-on!” I opened my eyes and looked over at Sverre, the boy who had shouted. He was pointing across the narrow room to where Tor was standing, with his arms down by his sides, his dick in the air and a smile on his face. Tor had the biggest dick in the class, or, perhaps, in the whole school. It dangled between his legs like a pork sausage, and this was no secret, because he always wore tight trousers and placed it at an angle, pointing upward, so that everyone could see. Yes, it was big. But now, in its erect state, it was enormous. “Jumping Jehoshaphat,” Geir Håkon shouted. Everyone looked at Tor. There was a sudden excitement in the atmosphere, and it was obvious that something had to be done. Such an extraordinary circumstance could not be allowed to go to waste. “Let’s take him to Fru Hensel!” Sverre shouted. “Come on, quick, before it’s too late!” Fru Hensel was our gym teacher. She came from Germany and spoke broken Norwegian. She was meticulous yet distant—in sum, what we called snooty. As a teacher she was a nightmare because she had a predilection for gym apparatus and hardly ever let us play soccer. Tor protested and writhed as Sverre and three others carried him out of the shower, but rather halfheartedly. The rest of us followed. And it was quite a sight. Tor, stark naked with an enormous stiffy, carried by four boys, also naked, and followed by a procession of more naked boys. Once in front of Fru Hensel, they stood him up as though he were a statue to be examined, left him like that for five seconds or so, then laid him down and charged back to the changing room. Few of us believed there would be any consequences, for the simple reason that it would be embarrassing for Fru Hensel to take the matter any further. We were wrong. The only person to come out of this with his honor intact was Tor, who emerged as a victim—the headmaster, the class teacher, and Fru Hensel regarded the incident as a case of bullying—and a winner, for now everyone, including the girls, knew about this sensational detail of his physique without his having had to lift a finger. That night I posed naked in front of the mirror for a long time. It was easier said than done. The only full-length mirror we had was in the hall by the stairs. I couldn’t exactly stand there naked, even if there was no one in the house, because someone could come home at any moment, and even if I reacted quickly that person would still see my butt beating a swift retreat up the stairs. No, it had to be the bathroom mirror. But it was designed solely for faces. If you got up close with your legs as far back as possible you could catch a glimpse of your body but from such a bizarre angle that it told you nothing. So I waited until Mom had finished washing up after dinner and had taken a seat in the living room with the newspaper and a cup of coffee. Then I fetched a chair from the kitchen. If she asked what I was doing with it, I could say I was going to stand the cassette player on it while I was in the bath. But she didn’t ask. First I looked at the front of my body. My dick wasn’t like Tor’s, not at all. More like a little cork. Or a kind of spring, because it quivered when you flicked it lightly. I put it in my hand. How big was it? Then I turned and looked at it from the side. In fact, it seemed a bit bigger that way. Anyway, it looked like all the dicks in our class, apart from Tor’s, didn’t it? I fared worse with my arms. They were so thin. So was my chest. I was supposed to do push-ups in soccer training, but I always cheated, because in reality, and only I knew this, I couldn’t do a single one. Finally, I ran my bath. The hot water stung my skin so much that it was impossible to sit. But I managed. I sat, got up, sat, got up, sat, got up until my skin was used to the temperature and I could lie there, letting the heat wash over me while music poured from the little tape player and I sang at the top of my lungs, dreaming about becoming famous and what all the girls I knew would say then. I feel lo lo lo, I sang. I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo. I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo. Lo, I feel lo. I feel lo. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. Lonely lone. Ah I feel SO LONELY! So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely. I caught every little nuance in Sting’s voice, even the whimper at the end. The seventeenth of May was the high point of spring for us, as Christmas was of the winter. At school, we sang “Vi Ere en Nasjon, Vi Med,” “Norge i Rødt, Hvitt og Blått,” and “Ja, Vi Elsker”; we learned about Henrik Wergeland and what happened at Eidsvoll in 1814. At home, ribbons and flags were taken out, along with all the flutes and horns we could find. From the very early morning all the families on our housing estate, in Tybakken, would emerge from their houses wearing traditional costume, or their best dresses or suits, and head for Arendal, where crowds lined the long street along which the procession would pass. And the procession, that was us. All the schools in the district would be marching. It was raining when I got up, and I was upset about that because I had to wear a waterproof anorak and trousers over my new clothes. I had been given light-blue Levi’s, a pair of white Tretorn tennis shoes, and a grayish-white, waist-length jacket. I was especially pleased with the jeans. The atmosphere in Arendal was feverish but expectant. As we approached the assembly area, with the skies delivering unfailingly regular bursts of drizzle, it became clear that we would be walking side by side with a class from Roligheden School. I played soccer with some of the boys, but there were many faces I had never seen. A girl turned. She had wavy blond hair and large blue eyes, and she smiled at me. I didn’t smile back, but I held her gaze. The procession began to move. Somewhere far ahead a band was playing. One of our teachers began to sing, and we joined in. After marching for perhaps twenty minutes, some of us, especially the boys, found our patience waning; we started laughing and fooling around, and when some boys used their flags to lift girls’ skirts the idea caught on. I made my way toward the blond girl, along with Dag Magne, fortunately, so that I was part of something and not just acting on my own. I put my flag under a pleat of her skirt and lifted; she spun on her heel, holding her skirt down with one hand, and shouted, “Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.” But the eyes that looked at me were smiling. I did it to some other girls as well, so that it wouldn’t be suspicious if I approached her again. “Don’t do that!” she said this time, and ran ahead, away from me. “Don’t be so childish!” Was she really angry? Seconds passed. Then she turned and smiled. Briefly, but it was enough: she wasn’t angry, she didn’t think I was childish. I studied the girl again. She wasn’t very tall, and she was wearing a pink jacket, a light-blue skirt, and thin white stockings. Her nose was small, her mouth large, and she had a little cleft in her chin. I felt pains in my stomach. When she spun around to keep her skirt from being lifted, I had seen that she had big breasts; her jacket had been open and the white sweater beneath insubstantial. Oh, dear God, please let me go out with her. I didn’t even know her name. That autumn, our band finally became a reality. The name I’d chosen won the day: Blood Clot was what we wrote on our jackets and satchels, and we practiced in the basement of the new chapel. Dag Magne had arranged it; his mother did the cleaning for a doctor who was on the church committee. Dag Magne was also the only one of us who could play or who evinced anything that resembled musical talent. He played the guitar and sang, I played the guitar, Kent Arne played the bass, Dag Lothar the drums. At the end-of-term Christmas party, we were booked in the gymnasium. Although the band came apart at the seams, everyone playing at his own tempo, and Kent Arne tuning his bass in the middle, and although most of the audience was critical, even the fourth years venturing a few snide remarks, the feeling among us afterward, as we stood in the school playground, in ripped jeans and denim jackets, and with scarves around our necks, could not have been better. We were in the sixth class now, would soon be in the ungdomsskole, and we were in a band. The fact that the band split up right after that, as neither Dag Lothar nor Kent Arne wanted to continue, was a setback, but Dag Magne and I carried on as a duo, recording songs at his house, listening to music, dreaming of a breakthrough. That spring, at a school parents’ evening, we performed two songs. Before we played, I gave a little introductory talk about punk to the parents. “In recent years a completely new form of music has sprung up among the English working classes,” I explained. “Some of you may have heard about it. It’s called punk. Those who play punk are not great musicians but rebels who want to rebel against society. They wear leather jackets and studded belts and they’ve got safety pins everywhere. You could say the safety pin is their symbol.” I gazed enthusiastically across the assembly of hairdressers, secretaries, nurses, housecleaners, and housewives. Before every Christmas and summer holiday for the past five years they had seen me standing on the stage, either as Joseph in the Nativity play or as the mayor in “Borgmester i Byen,” and now here I was again, this time as a spokesman for punk and a member of Blood Clot. Our next performance was during a class. We played the same two songs. After we finished, most of the students whistled and the teacher, the red-bearded Finsådal, went over to Dag Magne and said his guitar playing was beginning to take off. That hurt. Slowly the dream of overnight fame as a pop star faded while another appeared: our soccer coach, Øyvind, gathered us together at the end of a training session and said that we might be playing the pre-match game, at Kristiansand Stadium, before IK Start versus Mjøndalen. For me, playing at the stadium, with the opportunity to be seen not only by the immense crowd but also by the professional players themselves, was charged with enormous significance. I played for one of the region’s best teams, and I always thought that my being one of the worst players on the team, slow and without much skill, was a temporary state of affairs. Actually I was good, actually I could do everything as well as the others, it was just a matter of time before it would become evident. I felt like this because in my mind I could knock in goals from every conceivable and inconceivable angle and steam past whoever was on the wing. All I needed to do was align my actions with my thoughts, making them one and the same, and then it was done. Why couldn’t that happen during a pre-match game at Kristiansand Stadium? Yes, that was how it was. It was all in my head. We trained and played home games at Kjenna, a field just below the big housing estate in Brattekleiv, about half an hour by bike from Tybakken, and most of the boys I played with came from there. That was when I saw her again. “Caption: we work in an office; however, we have dressed for the circus. What a humorous mixup.”Buy the print » The beginning of June, blue sky, not a cloud in sight. Even though the sun was low and the shadows from the trees stretched across the pitch, it was still so hot that sweat ran down my face and neck as we panted and puffed and kicked and the ball thudded between us. I had white Umbro shorts and a pair of Le Coq Sportif boots, which I polished after every session and would turn around in my hand and admire with immense pleasure and satisfaction. That evening four girls jumped off their bikes at the end of the field, pressed down the kickstands, and strolled, laughing and chatting, over to the side of the field, by some rocks. Girls did sometimes come and watch us, but I had never seen her there before. For it was her, there was no doubt. For the rest of the practice, I was aware of her at every moment. Everything I did, I did for her. When we had finished playing, done our stretching exercises, and the XL-1 bottles had been passed around, I sat down on the grass below the girls with Lars and Hans Christian. Lars shouted some insults up to them and received laughter and more insults in return. “Do you know them?” I said, as warily as I could. “Yes,” Lars said, bored. “Are they in your class?” “Yes. Kajsa and Sunniva. The others are in H.C.’s class.” I leaned back on the grass with my hands behind my head and my eyes squinting into the rays of the orange sun. One of my teammates ducked his whole head into a bucket of water by the touchline. He straightened up and tossed his head. The drops of water formed a glittering arc in the air for a brief instant before dissipating. “I’ve seen one of them before,” I said. “The one on the far right. What’s her name?” “Kajsa?” “Oh, really?” Lars glanced at me. He had curly hair, freckles, and a slightly cheeky expression, but his eyes were warm and always had a glint. “We’re neighbors,” he said. “I’ve known her since I learned to walk. Are you interested?” “No-oo,” I said. Lars bored a rigid finger into my chest a few times. “Ye-es,” he said, grinning. “Should I introduce you?” “Introduce?” I said, my mouth suddenly dry. “Isn’t that what it’s called, you who know everything?” “Yes, I suppose it is. No. Not now. That is, not at all. I’m not interested. I was just wondering. I thought I had seen her before.” “Kajsa’s nice,” Lars said. Then he whispered, “And she’s got big breasts.” “Yes,” I said. I turned without thinking and looked at her. Lars laughed and got up. She looked at me. She looked at me! I cycled home along the old gravel road through the forest, where the air had cooled. The sun shone on the ridge close by, still bare after a fire the previous year, before it disappeared where the hills began and tall, dense spruce trees lined both sides of the road like a wall. My bike was the same one I’d had since I was small, a DBS Kombi, with the seat and the handlebars raised as far as they would go, which made it look like a kind of mutant. I sang at the top of my voice as I flew around all the bumps and potholes and sometimes skidded sideways with a static rear wheel: Shoot, shoot! Dodiddilidodo Shoot, shoot! Dodiddilidodo Shoot, shoot! Dodiddilidodo You come all flattarp he come Groovin’ out slowly he got Ju ju eyeball he won Holy roller he got Here down to his knees Got to be a joker, he just do what he pleases. That was the opening track on the “Abbey Road” LP, “Come Together,” or, at least, how it sounded to my ears. Well, I knew it wasn’t exactly what they sang, but what did it matter as I whizzed down the hill in the forest, absolutely throbbing with happiness? At the crossroads I braked for a car, then picked up speed and pedalled as hard as I could up the gravel on the other side. I swallowed a midge or two and tried in vain to cough them up, crossed the main road, and followed the bike path down to the Fina station, where a gang of kids were sitting at the tables outside, their bikes and mopeds parked a little way from them. No one took any notice of me, if indeed they saw me at all. The quickest way to cycle home from here was along the main road, but I jumped off at a path on the way and began to push my bike uphill. Soon all around me was forest, not a house or a road to be seen. There were trees everywhere, tall, broad-crowned deciduous trees, cluttered with green leaves, full of chattering birds. The path, which was no more than beaten earth and bare rockface, was crossed in several places by huge roots that resembled prehistoric animals. The grass growing alongside the streambed was thick and lush. In the wilderness at the bottom there were fallen trees with smooth trunks, and many plants covered the bed between the dry, lifeless branches, which had been there for as long as I could remember. It was easy to imagine that the forest was deep, endlessly deep, and full of mystery. Kajsa was constantly on my mind in the following weeks. I had two recurrent images of her. In one she was turning to me, with her blond hair and blue eyes, wearing the pink and light-blue clothes of the seventeenth of May. In the second she was lying naked in front of me in a field. The latter I conjured up every night before I went to sleep. The thought of her big white breasts and pink nipples made my body ache. I lay writhing while imagining various indistinct but intense things that I did with her. The second image aroused something else in me. Once, as I was jumping off a cliff, floating in the air with the sun on my face, I caught a glimpse of her in my mind, and a wild cheer broke free from my stomach, more or less at the same instant that my feet hit the surface and my body plunged into the bluish-green seawater, and, surrounded by a rush of bubbles and with the taste of salt on my lips, I headed for the surface again with slow arm movements and a quiver of happiness in my chest. At the dinner table, while I was peeling the skin off a piece of cod, or chewing a mouthful of hashed lung, her image might suddenly appear and she was so radiant that everything else was pushed into the shadows. But I didn’t see her at all in reality. The distance as the crow flies between our two estates was only a few kilometres, but the social distance was greater and could not be covered by either bike or bus. Kajsa was a dream, an image in my head, a star in the firmament. Then something happened. After another match on the Kjenna pitch, a girl came over to me. “Can I have a word with you?” she said. “Yes, of course,” I said. A hope so wild that it made me smile was ignited. “Do you know who Kajsa is?” she said. I reddened and looked down. “Yes,” I said. “She wants me to ask you a question,” she said. “What?” I said. A wave of heat surged up inside me, as though my chest were filling with blood. “Kajsa was wondering if you would like to go out with her,” she said. “Would you?” “Yes,” I said. “Great,” she said. “She’s waiting over by the changing room. Will we see you there afterward?” “Yes,” I said. “That’s fine.” As she went away I looked down at the ground for a second. Thank God, I said to myself. Because now it had happened. Now I was going out with Kajsa! With Kajsa. Dazed, I began to walk along the touchline. Suddenly it struck me that I had a big problem. She was there, waiting for me. I would have to speak to her. We would have to do something together. What would it be? On my way into the changing room, I could either pretend I didn’t see her or just flash a fleeting smile because I had to go and change. But then when I had to go out again . . . It was a mild evening, the air smelled of grass and was filled with birdsong. We had won, and the voices rising from the changing room were triumphant. Kajsa was standing in the road nearby with the girl I’d talked to and another friend. She smiled. I smiled back. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said. “I’ll just get changed,” I said. “Be out afterward.” She nodded. In the shedlike changing room, I undressed as slowly as possible while feverishly trying to think of a way to extricate myself with honor. To go off with her, unprepared, was inconceivable, it would never work. So I had to find a convincing excuse. Homework? I wondered, loosening a shin guard, slippery with sweat. No, that would give her a bad impression of me. I went back out without having prepared anything. “Hi,” I said, stopping in front of Kajsa and her friends, with my hands around the handlebars of my bike. “You were so good, all of you,” Kajsa said. She was wearing a white T-shirt. Her breasts bulged beneath it. Levi’s 501s with a red plastic belt. White socks. White Nike sneakers with a light-blue logo. I swallowed. “Do you think so?” I said. She nodded. “Are you coming with us?” “Actually, I don’t have a lot of time this evening.” “No?” “No. I really should be going now.” “Oh, that’s a shame,” she said, meeting my eyes. “What do you have to do?” “I promised I would help my father with something. A wall he’s building. But can’t we meet tomorrow?” “Of course.” “Where, then?” “I can go to your place after school.” “Do you know where I live?” “Tybakken, right?” “Yes, that’s right.” I swung a leg over my bike. “Bye!” I said. “Bye!” she said. “See you tomorrow!” I cycled off, casually to the observer, until I was out of sight, then I stood on the pedals, leaned forward, and began to pump like a wild man. It was absolutely fantastic and absolutely awful. Go to your place, she’d said. She knew where I lived. And she wanted to be with me. Not only that. We were going out. I was going out with Kajsa! Oh, everything I wanted was now within reach! Though not yet. What would I talk to her about? What would we do? After supper I went into Yngve’s room and told him what had happened. “I got together with Kajsa today,” I said. He looked up from the schoolbooks spread out on his desk and smiled. “Kajsa? I haven’t heard her name before. Who’s she?” “She’s at Roligheden. In the sixth class. She’s gorgeous.” “I don’t doubt that,” Yngve said. “Congratulations.” “Thanks,” I said. “But there’s just one thing . . . I need some advice . . .” “Yeah?” “I don’t know . . . Well, I don’t know her at all. I don’t know . . . what should we do? She’s coming here tomorrow, you see. I don’t even know what to say!” “It’ll be fine,” Yngve said. “Just don’t think about it and it’ll be fine. You can always make out instead of talking!” “Ha-ha.” “It’ll be fine, Karl Ove. Relax.” “Do you think so?” “Goes without saying.” Back in my room, I put on “McCartney II” and lay down on the bed. Every so often I had an attack of the shivers. Imagine me actually going out with her! Perhaps she was lying on her bed, in her room, in her house, thinking about me at this very minute? Perhaps she had gone to bed, perhaps she was wearing only panties in bed? I rolled over onto my stomach and rubbed my groin against the mattress while singing “Temporary Secretary” and thinking about all that lay in store for me. She arrived an hour after we’d had dinner. I had been walking to and fro by the windows facing the road and was as prepared as I could be. Nevertheless, it was a shock to see her cycling up the hill. For a few seconds I was unable to breathe normally. Kent Arne, Geir Håkon, and Leif Tore were outside, hanging over the handlebars of their bikes, and when they all turned to look at her I felt a surge of pride. No one had ever seen a more attractive girl in Tybakken. And it was me that she had come to see. I put on my shoes and jacket and went out and grabbed my bike. “She was asking where you lived, Karl Ove!” Geir Håkon said. “Oh yes?” I said to him, meeting Kajsa’s gaze. “Hi,” I said. “You found your way here?” “Yes, it was no problem,” she said. “I didn’t know exactly which house it was, but . . .” “Shall we go?” I said. “All right,” she said. I mounted my bike. She mounted hers. “See you!” I said to the boys. I turned to her. “We can go up there.” “Great,” she said. I knew that they were watching us and that they were more than ordinarily envious of me. How on earth had he done it? they were thinking. Where had he met her? And how in the name of all things living and moving had he managed to land her? After we cycled part of the way up, Kajsa got off her bike. I did the same. A wind rose through the forest, rustling the leaves beside us, and then it dropped. The sound of tires on tarmac. Trouser legs rubbing against each other. The cork soles of her sandals on the road. I waited for her to come alongside me. “That’s a nice jacket,” I said. “Where did you get it?” “Thank you,” she said. “At Bajazzo’s, in Kristiansand.” “Oh,” I said. We reached the intersection with Elgstien. Her breasts were swaying; my eyes were permanently drawn to them. Did she notice? “We can go over to the shop and see if anyone’s there,” I said. “Mmm,” she said. Was she regretting this already? Should I kiss her now? Would that be right? We were at the top of the hill, and I swung a leg over my bike saddle. I waited until her feet were on her pedals, then I set off. Another gust of wind blew past us. I freewheeled down the little hill to B-Max. It was closed, and there was no one around. “Doesn’t seem to be anyone here,” I said. “Shall we go to your house?” “All right,” she said. I decided I would kiss her if a glimmer of a chance arose. And definitely hold her hand. Something had to happen. After all, we were girlfriend and boyfriend now. But no chance arose. We cycled along the old gravel road up to Kjenna, which was deserted, then up the hills to her house, and stopped outside. We hadn’t exchanged many words on the way, but enough to know it hadn’t been a disaster. “Mom and Dad are at home,” she said. “So you can’t come in.” Did that mean I could when they weren’t? “O.K.,” I said. “But it’s late. Perhaps I should be getting back.” “Yes, it’s quite a long way!” she said. “Shall we meet again tomorrow?” I said. “I can’t,” she said. “We’re going out in the boat.” “On Thursday then?” “Yes. Will you come up here?” “Yes, of course.” The bikes were between us the whole time. It wasn’t possible to lean over and kiss her. And perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted it, either, right in front of her house. I got back on my bike. “I’ll be off then,” I said. “See you!” Well, it could have been worse. I hadn’t got very far, but nothing had been ruined forever. It couldn’t continue like this, I realized; we couldn’t just talk. If we did, everything would wither and die. I had to kiss her; we had to do what proper boyfriends and girlfriends did. But how to make the move? I couldn’t just put my arms around her, out of the blue. Imagine if she didn’t want it! Imagine if I couldn’t pull the move off! Yet it had to happen, and it would have to happen the next time, that much was certain. And in a suitable place where no one could see us. Thank God for her boat trip. It gave me two whole days to plan. As I was about to fall asleep, I remembered that we had soccer practice on Thursday. Which meant that I would have to call and tell her. All next day I dreaded it. Our telephone at home was in the hall. Everyone could hear what was said, unless I closed the sliding door, but that was bound to arouse my parents’ curiosity, so the best thing would be to call from a phone booth. There was one by the bus stop opposite the Fina station, and I cycled down there as late as I could—to be precise, a little after eight. If there was nothing special going on, I had to be home by eight-thirty, because I had to be in bed by nine-thirty on weekdays. The rule was inflexible, even though everyone I knew stayed up later. Having parked my bike, I searched for her home number in the telephone directory. What I was going to say had been reverberating around in my head. I dialled the whole number, apart from the last digit, very quickly. Then I waited a few seconds to get my breathing under control and dialled the last digit. “Pedersen,” a woman’s voice said. “May I speak to Kajsa, please?” I said hurriedly. “Who’s calling?” “Karl Ove,” I said. “Just a moment.” There was a pause. I heard footsteps fading into the distance, voices. A bus came down the hill and slowly pulled into the bus stop. I pressed the receiver tighter against my ear. “Hello?” Kajsa said. “Is that Kajsa?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “This is Karl Ove,” I said. “I could hear that!” she said. “Hi,” I said. “Hi,” she said. “I have to go to soccer tomorrow,” I said. “So I can’t make it to your house as we agreed.” “Then I’ll see you down there. You’ll be at Kjenna, won’t you?” “Yes.” Pause. “Was it nice?” I said. “Was what nice?” “The boat trip? Was it nice?” “Yes.” Pause. “See you tomorrow then!” I said. “Yes. Bye,” she said. “Bye.” “He’s not gay, but he’s often gay-adjacent.”Buy the print » I put down the receiver. The air was warm and full of fumes from the idling bus engine. I cycled off. My forehead was coated in sweat. I ran my hand through my hair. My hand was sweaty, too. But my hair was fine; I had washed it the night before so that it would be perfect for the date with Kajsa. Outside B-Max, I stopped. Rested my foot against the curbstone. Suddenly I knew how I would do it. Only a few weeks earlier I had been here, surrounded by a crowd of people, with Tor as the center of attention. He had built his own bicycle, with a motorbike seat and an enormous new cogwheel at the front. He was doing wheelies, back and forth, spitting great gobbets of saliva across the tarmac. Merethe, his girlfriend, was also there. I had been hanging out with Dag Magne, and we had bumped into them and stayed. Tor cycled over to Merethe and kissed her. Then he took a watch from his inside pocket—it was on a chain—glanced at it, and said, “Shall we see how long we can make out, huh?” Merethe nodded, and then they leaned toward each other and kissed. You could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. She had her eyes closed and her arms around him; he stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes open. Everyone was watching them. After ten minutes he held up his watch and straightened his back. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ten minutes,” he said. That was how to do it. I would take off my watch and ask if we could see how long we could kiss. And then all we had to do was kiss. I pushed off with my foot. It was important to find a suitable place. In the forest, of course, but where? Up by her place? No, I didn’t know my way around there. But of course. In the forest, by the path up from the Fina. Under the trees there. That was perfect. No one would see us. The ground was soft. And the light was so wonderful as it fell between the treetops. After the soccer practice I dipped my head in the bucket of water on the touchline and tried to act normal. But it wasn’t easy; the knowledge that she was up there, and not just her but also her friends, looking at me, was burned into my consciousness. Then she came down. “Are you going to get changed?” she said. I nodded. “I’ll come with you. I’ve got something to tell you afterward.” Tell me? Was she going to finish it? I started walking. She stretched out her hand. It brushed against mine. Was it by chance? Or could I hold it? I looked at her. She smiled at me. I grabbed her hand in one swift movement. Someone was whispering behind us. I turned. It was Lars and John. They were rolling their eyes. I smiled. She gently squeezed my hand. The walk across the pitch had never been as long as it was this evening. Holding her hand was almost more than I could bear; the whole time I felt an urge to withdraw my hand to bring this unbearable happiness to an end. “Hurry up, then,” she said when we got there. “O.K.,” I said. In the changing shed, I leaned back against the wall. My heart was pounding. Then I pulled myself together, threw on my clothes, and joined Kajsa. She looked happy. She stroked a strand of hair from her face with her small hand. Her nails were painted in a semi-transparent pink varnish. “This Saturday I’ll be at home without my parents,” she said. “I’ve told Mom that Sunniva’s coming over. So she’s going to make a pizza and buy Coke for us. But Sunniva isn’t coming. Would you like to come?” I swallowed. “Sure,” I said. Some of the other boys on the team cheered us from the changing shed. Kajsa stood with one hand on her handlebars and the other down by her side. “Shall we go?” I said. “Let’s,” she said. “Down?” I said. She nodded, and we got on our bikes. We pedalled along the shaded gravel road, me in front, Kajsa right behind. At the crest of the long hill, I braked so that we could race down side by side. The sun lit up the ridge on the other side. The insects swarming in the air were like glitter that someone had scattered. Yes, the path above the Fina station was the place to be. The thought sent a wave of terror through me. It was like having climbed too high up a rock and looking down at the water, knowing that you had to conquer your fear and dive or chicken out. Did she know what was going to happen? I sneaked a glance at her. Oh, the ripple of her breasts. Oh, oh, oh. But her face was serious. What did that mean? We jumped off our bikes and walked up the hill to the main road. We hadn’t said a word since we left Kjenna. If I said something now it had to be important, it couldn’t be some triviality. Her trousers were cotton, a pastel-green color, and secured around the waist by a rope belt. They hung loose over her thighs but were tighter around the hips and across the bottom. She was wearing a T-shirt with a thin cardigan over it, which was white with a hint of yellow. She wore sandals but no socks. Her toenails were painted with the same polish as her fingers. She had a chain around one ankle. She looked fantastic. When we came to the main road and only a long hill down and a long hill up separated us from what was to happen, what I most wanted to do was cycle off and leave her. Just step on the pedals and cycle out of her life. And then why stop at that? I could cycle far away from our house. Tybakken, Tromøya, Aust-Agder, Norway, Europe, I could leave everything behind me. I could become the Cycling Dutchman. Damned for ever to cycle around the world, with a ghostly light from the lamp on my handlebars illuminating the country roads. “Where are we going, actually?” she said as we sped down the hill. “I know somewhere nice,” I said. “It’s not far.” She didn’t say anything. We cycled past the Fina station, and I pointed up the hill between the trees. Again she jumped off as soon as the road became steeper. A thin layer of sweat glistened on her forehead. The sun hung over the ridges to the west, a silent blaze. The air was filled with birdsong. I was close to throwing up. We entered the path. Light filtered down between the treetops, as I had imagined it, and was refracted the way it’s refracted under water. Pillars of light sloped into the ground. I stopped. “We can leave our bikes here,” I said. We did. Both of us kicked out the stands and stood the bikes upright. I started walking. She followed. I looked for a suitable place to lie down. Grass or moss. Our footsteps sounded unnaturally loud. I didn’t dare look at her. But she was right behind me. There. There was a good spot. “We can lie down here,” I said. Without looking at her I sat down. After some hesitation she sat down next to me. I put my hand in my pocket and found my watch. I took it out and held it in my open palm in front of her. “Should we time how long we can kiss?” I said. “What?” she said. “I’ve got a watch,” I said. “Tor managed ten minutes. We can beat that.” I put the watch down on the ground—it was eighteen minutes to eight, I noted—placed my hands on her shoulders and gently leaned her back while pressing my lips against hers. When we were both lying down I inserted my tongue in her mouth. It met hers, pointed and soft like a little animal’s, and I began to move my tongue around and around inside. I had my hands alongside my body; I wasn’t touching her with anything except my lips and my tongue. Our bodies lay like two small boats beached beneath the treetops. I concentrated on getting my tongue to go around as smoothly as possible while the thought of her breasts, which were so close to me, and her thighs, which were so close to me, and what was between her thighs, under her trousers, under her panties, was seared into my consciousness. But I didn’t dare touch her. She lay with her eyes closed, rotating her tongue around mine. I had my eyes open, groped for the watch, found it, and held it within reach. Three minutes so far. Some saliva ran down from the corner of her mouth. She wriggled. I pressed my groin against the ground, letting my tongue go around and around, around and around. This wasn’t as good as I had imagined, in fact it was quite strenuous. Some dry leaves crunched beneath her head as she shifted position. Our mouths were full of thick saliva. Seven minutes now. Four left. Mmm, she said, but it was not a sound of pleasure, there was something wrong, she stirred, but I didn’t let go, she moved her head while I continued to rotate my tongue. She opened her eyes, but didn’t look at me—they were staring up at the sky. Nine minutes. The root of my tongue ached. More saliva from the corners of our mouths. My braces occasionally knocked against her teeth. Actually we didn’t need to keep going for more than ten minutes and one second to beat Tor’s record. And that was now. We had beaten him now. But we could beat him by a large margin. Fifteen minutes—that ought to be possible. Five left then. But my tongue ached, it seemed to be swelling, and the saliva, which you didn’t notice much when it was hot, left you with a slight feeling of revulsion when it ran down your chin, not quite so hot. Twelve minutes. Isn’t that enough? Enough now? No, a bit more. A bit more, a bit more. At exactly three minutes to eight I took my head away. She got up and wiped her mouth with her hand without looking at me. “We did fifteen minutes!” I said, getting up. “We beat him by five minutes!” Our bikes gleamed at the far end of the path. We walked toward them. She brushed leaves and twigs off her trousers and cardigan. “Hang on,” I said. “There’s something on your back as well. She stopped and I picked off bits and pieces that had got caught in her cardigan. “There you go,” I said. “I’d better go home now,” she said as we reached the bikes. “Me, too,” I said, pointing upward. “There’s a shortcut through the forest.” “Bye,” she said, getting on her bike and freewheeling down the bumpy path. “Bye,” I said, grabbing the handlebars and walking up. That night I lay fantasizing about her breasts, milky-white and large, and all the things we could have done on the forest floor, until I fell asleep. I had to call her because we hadn’t arranged when I should go to her house on Saturday, but I put off doing it all the next day and also part of Saturday until there was no avoiding it, and at two o’clock I jumped on my bike and pedalled down to the phone booth again. There was another problem as well, which was that I had to be home by half past eight, even on a Saturday, which was not at all in tune with the life I was leading now. What would she think of me? The sky was overcast, and the matte-gray cloud cover seemed to suck the colors out of the countryside. The road was gray, the rocks in the ditch were gray, even the leaves on the trees had a weft of gray in their greenness. Also the heat of the previous days had gone. It wasn’t cold—it was maybe sixteen or seventeen degrees—but cold enough for me to button up to the neck as I cycled down. My jacket ballooned out in the air. I stood my bike behind the green, hat-shaped fibreglass shelter at the bus stop. A stream flowed nearby, past branches and bushes and litter, mostly candy wrappers, probably from the Fina station; I could see Caramello, Hobby, Nero, Bravo, and a blue Hubba Bubba wrapper. I took the coins from my pocket, went into the booth, and placed them on top of the machine, ready. Dialled the number in the directory as various jokes went through my head. Why are there so many Hansens in the phone book? They’ve all got phones. Followed by: Why haven’t the Chinese got a phone book? Too many Wings and Wongs, and you might wing a wong number. Operator, operator, call me an ambulance. O.K., you’re an ambulance. “Hello?” a voice said. It was Kajsa! “Hi,” I said. “This is Karl Ove. Is that Kajsa?” “Yes,” she said. “Hi.” “We forgot to talk about when I should come over,” I said. “Is there any particular time that would be suitable? It makes no difference to me.” “Errrm,” she said. “Well, in fact, it’s all off.” “Off,” I said. “Can’t you make it? Are your parents not going out after all?” “What I mean to say is,” she started. “Erm . . . erm . . . I can’t . . . well, go out with you anymore.” What? Was she ending it? “Hello?” she said. “Is it over?” I said. “Yes,” she said. “It’s over.” I said nothing. I could hear her breathing at the other end. Tears were running down my cheeks. A long time passed. “Well, goodbye,” she said suddenly. “Bye,” I said. My eyes were blinded by tears. I wiped them with the back of my hand, sniffed, got on my bike, and began to pedal homeward. I barely saw the road in front of me. Why had she done that? Why? Now that things had started to click? On the day we were going to be alone in her house? She liked me a few days ago, so why didn’t she like me now? Was it because we hadn’t talked much? And she was so good-looking. She was so unbelievably good-looking. Jesus Christ. JesusfuckingChrist. JesusfuckingshittingChrist. When I got to B-Max, I dried my tears on the sleeves of my jacket. It was Saturday just before closing time, and the parking lot was full of cars and people with shopping bags and kids, loads of kids. But perhaps if they saw my tears they’d think they were caused by the wind? I was cycling, after all. Completely empty, neutral spaces were developing inside me, ten seconds could pass without my thinking a single thought, without my knowing that I even existed, and then the image of Kajsa was suddenly there, it was over, and a sob shook me, impossible to stop. I locked my bike and put it in its place outside the house. I stood still in the front hall, listening to hear where the others were—now was not the time to bump into anyone—and when it sounded as if the coast were clear I went upstairs and into the bathroom, where I washed my face carefully before going into my room and sitting down on the bed. After a while I got up and went to Yngve’s room. He was on his bed playing the guitar and glanced up when I entered. “What’s up? Have you been crying?” he said. “Is it Kajsa? Did she drop you?” I nodded and started crying again. “Now, now, Karl Ove,” he said. “It’ll soon pass. There are many girls out there waiting. The world is full of girls! Forget her. It’s no big deal.” “Yes, it is,” I said. “We only went out for five days. And she’s so good-looking. She’s the only one I want to be with. No one else. And today of all days.” “Hey, don’t go anywhere,” he said, getting up. “I’ll play a song for you. It might help.” “What kind of song?” I said, sitting down. He flicked through a pile of singles on the shelf. “This one,” he said, holding up one of the Aller Værste!’s. “No Way Back.” “Oh, that one.” “Listen to the lyrics,” he said, removing the single from the sleeve, placing the plastic adapter in the middle of the turntable, then the forty-five, lifting up the stylus and putting it down on the first groove, which was already whizzing round. After a second’s scratching, the energetic drums pumped into life, then came the bass, the guitar, and the Farfisa organ, followed by the jangling, unbelievably exciting guitar riff and then the voice of the singer with the Stavanger accent: I’m not lying when I say I knew That me and you were already through I saw you were trying to hide it Until the sensi thin condom split Long-term plans and our shared visions Blown to bits in one minute flat You gave me a hug; I wanted to give you more But you certainly put paid to that. “Listen now!” Yngve said. All things pass—all things must decay You go to sleep; you wake up to a new day No way back now, nuthin’ to thank you for Nuthin’ to say, there’s your coat, there’s the door. “Yes,” I said. We were on the point of going banal I heard myself speaking and got irritated We had one too many and went sentimental But the words were still infected You broke my heart and gave me the clap I still haven’t finished the penicillin rap Why must we bang our heads against the same old wall When we know deep down we hate it all. “All things pass,” Yngve said when the song was over and the stylus had returned to its little rest. “All things must decay. You go to sleep; you wake up to a new day.” “I understand what you’re saying,” I said. “Did it help?” “Yes, a bit. Could you play it again?”

The Minister of the Interior stood in the middle of the room, assessing three suits laid over a chair. One was a pale morning-sky blue; the next tan, of light material, intended for these terrible summers; the last a heavy worsted English three-piece, gray, for state visits. They were slung across one another every which way, three corpses in a pile. The rest of the marbled room—his wife had liked to call it the “salon”—was in boxes, labelled, optimistically, with a forwarding address. Within the hour, efficient young Ari would drive the Minister to the airport, and from there—all being well—he would leave to join his wife and children in Paris. The car would not be a minute out of the driveway, he knew, before the household staff fell on these boxes like wild beasts upon carrion. The Minister of the Interior rubbed the trouser leg of the gray between his fingers. He was at least fortunate that the most significant painting in the house happened also to be the smallest: a van der Neer miniature, which, in its mix of light and water, reminded him oddly of his own ancestral village. It fit easily into his suit bag, wrapped in a pillowcase. Everything else one must resign oneself to losing: pictures, clothes, statues, the piano—even the books. “So it goes,” the philosophical Minister said out loud, surprising himself—it was a sentence from a previous existence. “So it goes.” Without furniture, without curtains, his voice rose unimpeded to the ceiling, as in a church. “You call me, sir?” Elena stood in the doorway, more bent over than he’d ever seen her. “Call? No . . . no.” She seemed not to hear him. Her eyes had taken on an uncomprehending glaze, open yet unseeing. It was the same look the Minister had noted in all those portraits of heroic peasants presently stacked against the wall. “Difficult days, Lele,” the Minister said, picking up the light blue, trying not to be discouraged by its creases. “Difficult days.” Elena twisted her apron in her hands. Her children, he knew, lived by the sea with their children. All along the coast the cell-phone network had been obliterated. “God is powerful,” she said, and bowed her head. Then: “God sent this wind.” The Minister sighed but did not correct her. They were from the same village originally, distant cousins—she had a great-uncle with his mother’s surname. He appreciated her simplicity. She had done much for his children over the years, and for him, always with this same pious sincerity, which was, to the Minister, as much a memento of his village as the woven reed baskets and brightly colored shawls of his childhood. But why bend so deeply, as if she were the only one suffering? “If it were only the wind!” the Minister said, tilting his head to look through the missing skylight. “We had measures in place for wind. It’s not true that we were unprepared. That is a wicked lie of the foreign press.” He pointed at a lemon tree, horizontal and broken outside the window. “The combination of the wind and the water. In the end, this is what proved so difficult. As I understand it, most of the deaths in the south were drownings, in fact.” He frowned at her puffy face, made puffier by tears, and at her apron strings, cutting into a wad of encircling fat. Why was her hair so sparse? There was only a year or two between them. But, of course, he had never felt old and, consequently, had never looked it. A clear case, in the Minister’s view, of the importance of mind over matter. “God is so powerful,” Elena said, and wept into her hands. Out of habit, the Minister thought now of Elena’s suffering and multiplied it by the population. (By inquiring after her gut feelings he had been able to correctly predict three elections, the death penalties of several notorious criminals, and the winners of half a dozen television singing contests.) He put a light hand on her shoulder. “Unfortunately, these weather events are democratic. Big countries, little countries. We are all caught by surprise. It’s not possible to fully prepare for them.” “God help the children!” Elena said. She swayed into his hand like a cow nudging a barn door. Gently, the Minister righted her. “Well, when we’re settled in Paris, Lele, we’ll send for you.” “Yes, Minister,” Elena said, but continued to weep freely, just as if he’d said, “When we’re settled in Paris, you will never hear from us again.” “Minister,” Ari said, appearing in the doorway. The Minister stepped forward and pressed the housekeeper to his chest. The girl of faint erotic memory had vanished, and in his arms he held an old woman, easily mistaken for his mother. Hard to believe that she had once been his sweet relief from the shock and boredom of his wife’s first pregnancy, the months and months of it, in this unforgiving climate, and with such a difficult, pampered woman. Now the Minister’s youngest daughter was turning seventeen, and his wife hoped to present the child as a débutante in a grand hotel in Paris, making some kind of opportunity out of a crisis. Thinking on this peculiar fact, the Minister got stuck on a sentence: I am further from my village now than I have ever been. Italicized just like that, in his mind. Unsettled, he drew back, pressing an inch and a half’s worth of currency into Elena’s hands, which, for the first time in their history, she made no pretense of declining, grabbing it from him like any beggar in the street, folding it, crying some more. “The time, Minister,” Ari said, tapping his wrist. The Minister had not ventured outside in three days. Yet the scrolling devastation held few surprises, maybe because the foreign news crews filmed in just this way, from the window of a moving vehicle. For the first mile or so, the magnitude of what had happened was not obvious. Up here, the storm had knocked down only every third tree, blown out a few windows, and driven a stone general and his horse nose first into the ground. By the time they reached the valley, however, any hope one had that the television exaggerated was destroyed. The water had retreated, leaving behind a shredded world of plastic, timber, and wire. Under the wall that had once circled the parade ground, the Minister spotted several pairs of feet, purple and bloated, liberated of their shoes. If Ari slowed or hesitated even for a moment, the sound of hands banging on the trunk came, but mostly he did not slow, and the S.U.V. rolled over everything in its path. The Minister thought of his children making this same journey forty-eight hours earlier. He looked through tinted windows at his people scavenging from mountains of rubble. He groaned and wept discreetly into a handkerchief. “Oh, I’m not listening to that.” The Minister—who had not thought that he could be seen or heard—experienced a surge of humiliation and rage, pressing him against his seat, inflaming the tips of his ears. “It wasn’t much use before”—Ari tapped the satellite navigation unit suctioned to the windscreen. “It’s totally pointless now. If a road looks O.K., I’ll take it. Otherwise I’ll detour. Sound O.K. to you, Minister?” “Yes, yes, whatever you think.” The blood that had rushed to his extremities returned to where it belonged. His tongue relaxed; his face lost its awful contortion. He wiped the wetness from his cheeks, folded the handkerchief into a sharp-tipped diamond, and replaced it in the top pocket of the gray suit. “Of course, the whole system is linked to an American military satellite,” the Minister said, leaning forward to peer at the delusional technology as it recommended impassable roads and pointed out a bridge no longer in existence. “If the Americans ever chose to switch it off, we would all be plunged into darkness. Metaphorically speaking.” Ari shook his head: “What a mess.” Through the windscreen they could see a large gathering of people, waiting outside an empty municipal office. As the car approached, heads began to turn, followed by hands lifted to throats, patting the skin there, over and over, like some mass mating call. The Minister took a pen and pad from his inside pocket and made a note of the location. For whom, for what purpose, he no longer knew. Ari wiped his forehead with his sleeve. “We can’t get through this.” “We are not going to get through,” the Minister corrected. “We’re going to stop. There are three crates of water in the trunk.” Ari made an incredulous face in the rearview mirror. “They’ll be just as thirsty by nightfall. Meanwhile, you miss your plane!” The Minister retrieved his handkerchief and worked at the sweat on his own forehead. “Your generation is so cynical. You should try to help every individual person you meet, Ari, as a reflex, without thinking.” Ari put his head on the steering wheel. “Here we find a fundamental weakness of the Christ doctrine,” the Minister declared, making that wise and relatable face that had always been such a success in his television lectures. “It troubles itself too much with conscience, rationale, and so on. Now, I myself am a student of human nature. I observe all faiths, and draw my own conclusions. For example, a Christian sees a tramp in the street, he begins agonizing. Should I give him the money in my pocket? What if he uses it for drink? What if he wastes it? What if there’s someone else who needs it more? What if I need it more? And so on. The Jews, the Muslims—they see a tramp, they give him money, they walk on. The action is its own justification.” “I’m not cynical,” Ari objected. “How can I be cynical? The fact is, I’m a Buddhist.” He examined his hair in the wing mirror and pressed the button for the back window. Fetid air—which the Minister had earlier made clear he did not want to breathe—invaded the vehicle. “Pull over just there. Look, I don’t mean to insult you—anyway, I’m nothing at all, as I said, only a student of human nature, so there’s no need to be insulted. Let’s get this water distributed, eh? Then we can move on.” With a great sigh, Ari drove forward until they were ten feet shy of the crowd. Here he stopped, leaving the engine running. The Minister, who was not a tall man, swung his little feet to the right, tried the handle twice, asked Ari to release the child lock, opened the door, and slipped down into ankle-deep sludge. His left shoe came off and was submerged. Catching the eye of a handsome peasant woman with a large child in her arms—seven or eight years old—he thought he saw in her anxious face the group’s dilemma. Hold your ground in this line? Or risk losing your place for a dubious little man who still cared about his shoes? “WATER!” the Minister cried—this broke the stalemate. He had reclaimed his shoe, and now, without planning to, found that he was opening his arms wide. Had he come to embrace them all? “We have water! Women and children first!” The people ran toward him, ignoring his instruction. He turned from them, walking thickly through the sludge to the trunk. The first to put a hand on him was a middle-aged man with a head wound that needed attention. For a moment, he seemed to recognize the Minister. Yet if recognition was there it was also perfectly useless. There were things that had mattered before the storm and things that mattered now, and the Minister fully understood that he belonged to the former category. Who cared, today, about the Long-Haired Bloc? The Minister’s offices, like much of the government, had been flattened; seeing this chaos on the news, even the Minister had not been able to rid himself of the childish notion that it had been stomped into the ground. And what was a Minister without a ministry? “Please, I beg of you—help my family.” So said the man with the wound. At the same moment, Ari stuck his head out the window. This left the Minister little choice but to reach for his wallet, take out the remaining paper currency, and press it into the hands of the man, who immediately had a portion of it snatched from him by a little girl, who in turn had her share taken from her by someone else, at which point the beleaguered Minister lost track, rolled up his sleeves, and turned back to bend over the trunk. He struck it twice with an imperious fist; it opened, as if by magic. The first thing was to rip the plastic covering off the crates while making a swift, imprecise count of how many bottles were in each layer. But the plastic was not so easily removed, and before he had finished ripping even one corner he felt many hands reaching around him, pushing him aside, knocking him to the ground. By the time he had struggled to his knees, fallen again, grabbed onto the bumper, and dragged himself up, the crates were gone, the people were running back to the municipal building, and several small fights had broken out. The Minister hung on to the side of the vehicle and edged his way around to the back door, one shoe forever lost to the mud. He heaved himself up into his seat. Without comment, Ari passed a tub of wet wipes over his shoulder. Without comment, the Minister took it. Before the storm, it would have taken the Minister perhaps an hour to get to the airport. Now the sun fell in one part of the sky, while the moon rose in another. He dared to look at his watch. Five hours had passed since he promised Ari that he would make no further attempts to leave the vehicle. “But I can’t hold on any longer. I’m afraid it’s unavoidable, Ari.” “Minister, everything is avoidable.” “Do you want me to piss myself? Is that it?” “You should not make promises your bladder can’t keep,” Ari said, causing the Minister to reflect that one never really knew a person until one was caught in a situation of extremity with that person. “I tell you it’s unavoidable!” “Well, I don’t know where you think I can stop. All these people are trying to get to the airport. If we stop they’ll slit my throat!” “You are becoming hysterical,” the Minister said. He pointed at a brick church whose four sides were still attached, providing the only shade for miles. Ari parked right at its door, like a chauffeur delivering a bride. People were everywhere, along with cars and vans and news trucks. The arrival of a small well-dressed man with one shoe did not attract much attention. The Minister struggled through an inert mass of people until he reached the yard behind the church, where he relieved himself against a sliver of dusty blue wall, watching with interest as it turned as vivid as the Virgin’s cloak. Somewhere off to his right, a German film crew lent a boom mike to an American film crew. “There’s a woman in there lighting candles, praying, etcetera,” an American voice said. “Her English is pretty good.” To which a German replied, “I sink we have enough church.” The Minister zipped up and walked with as much dignity as could be managed back through the milling crowd, accepting the sweat of many strangers. People without direction or focus, swatting halfheartedly at the flies, standing around with no purpose other than to be among one another. He caught a flash of Ari, smoking louchely out the car window—before a tall man blocked his view. More and more people gathered, and the Minister could get no farther. Then a sudden shouting and crushing; everyone turned to face the murderous sunbeams in the west, and the dark shadow of an open truck, from which two figures, silhouetted, hurled sacks into the crowd. Cornmeal? Rice? Why not demand an orderly queue? Why cause the maximum amount of chaos? Next to the Minister, a hysterical woman held her baby above her head and wailed. A nice spectacle for the foreign press! Toward them both a sack sailed; the gallant Minister moved to push the woman out of its path. He was rewarded by somebody’s powerful fist connecting with his left temple. Once again he found himself in the dirt, contemplating the bare feet of his countrymen. In pain, he called out for Ari; Ari heard, Ari replied—but from this nothing followed. The crowd was too thick to penetrate. The Minister decided instead to crawl forward on his hands and knees, and in this way made progress. He was within a yard of the car when he found himself being roughly lifted to his feet and brushed down by a pair of oversized, hairy hands. “On your feet, on your feet—we need everybody standing, if they can stand! Red Cross! Red Cross!” The man doing the shouting was broad and dark, with a boxer’s broken nose, thin, silky black hair cut in a Caesar style, and a chin with a huge, inelegant cleft. He was in uniform, though even at this confusing moment something in the Minister registered the wrongness of this, in terms both of this man’s particular body in a uniform and the uniform itself. “Please take your hands off me—I am going to my car.” The big man smiled foolishly and gripped the Minister by the elbow. A bolt of clarifying pain arrived: broken, in the fall. At the thought of spending any time in a local hospital, the Minister’s legs went weak. In response, the man took almost all of his companion’s weight and began pushing his own giant body through the last two layers of people until he had hold of the car’s door handle. “Red Cross! Back this up. I’ll open when you’re clear.” “Do no such thing!” the Minister croaked. But he had lost Ari’s vote. The car reversed, moving just fast enough that the man and the Minister were forced to jog along beside it. Once they were relatively free of the crowd, the man jumped into the car, pulled the Minister in beside him, and shut the door. The Minister backed away until he was pressed against the car window. “You’ve made a grave error. I am the Minister of the Interior—I advise you to get out of this vehicle at once.” The man chuckled and patted the Minister’s delicate knee. “I know who you are, Minister. I saw you arrive. I just want to go to the airport, that’s all. No trouble.” “Ari, this man is not Red Cross—that is not a Red Cross uniform. Stop this car immediately.” The man leaned forward and placed the flat edge of a knife against the back of Ari’s neck. “Keep driving,” he said. “I dress for the weather I want, not the weather I have.”Buy the print » Ari screamed, a woman’s scream. The man laughed again: the genial, warm laugh of someone who finds the world delightful. “Put that knife down,” the Minister said, in a very small voice. “Fine,” the man said, without any rancor, and slipped the weapon back into a pocket in his uniform. “You’ll see that it doesn’t change anything.” Considering Ari, driving and weeping, and himself—a slight gentleman in his mid-sixties with a broken elbow who did not, after all, weigh much more than sixty kilos—the Minister of the Interior understood that the man was entirely correct. They passed the old reservoir. The Minister was nudged gently in the ribs and offered that dim-witted smile. “Nothing to say?” The Minister lifted his chin and looked out the window. The reservoir was a decades-old failed public-works project, presided over by the Minister, and it was always unpleasant to pass it on the way to the airport. “You’re angry. Of course, I know very well you’re a proud man who doesn’t like to be tricked. I suppose I have tricked you, Minister. But think of me! I’m disappointed!” The sun was setting, pink, over the rancid water, and the cracked concrete walls of the overflowing reservoir made it look like the basin of some ancient ruined amphitheatre. It had a strange beauty. The Minister had never noticed any beauty in it before. He wished he did not have to notice it now, while stuck in a car with a lunatic and a coward, on the way to his own execution. “I may not be very educated, Minister, but I have my thoughts and feelings. You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover.” The Minister, lost in a fatalist haze, turned to his captor with a mournful face and said, matter-of-factly, “But of course you’re going to kill us.” The man frowned and bit his lip. “So you really don’t recognize me at all. Truly you don’t. Ah, it’s disappointing!” From Ari, another whimper. “I should know you?” “Well, we went through a lot together. Though my hair’s shorter now. But then so is yours. And the Prime Minister—he’s bald as a coot! And he was the longest-haired boy of all! Ha! Ha! What kids we all were!” “Please don’t kill me please don’t kill me please don’t kill me,” Ari pleaded, and, despite the sunset half blinding them all, and the large, menacing hand presently encasing the Minister’s knee, the precise and vengeful Minister took note of Ari’s use of the singular pronoun. “Who said a thing about killing anybody? No, no, no. We gave that up a long time ago. A long time ago. Some of us served our time for it, some didn’t—and I say well done to those who didn’t! But now you know me for sure, Minister. Marlboro! The Marlboro Man. Nobody believes me when I say the Prime Minister himself named me. But it’s true! My aunt used to send me the red ones from America—you must remember that—and he loved to smoke them. One day, we were making camp, way up in the hills this was, and he said, ‘Hey, you, Marlboro Man’—and it stuck. Forty years later, it’s still sticking.” If a bell rang for the Minister, it was a faint one indeed. He made his hands into a steeple and pressed them, upside down, between his knees. “You must understand, there is no way I can get you onto a plane. When we arrive, you will be arrested. It will be out of my hands. There is no other outcome.” The Marlboro Man gave the Minister’s knee a jovial squeeze. “But I don’t want to get on a plane, Minister. I wish only to go the airport. That’s where we hear all the action is—and I always want to be where the action is. Money, food, girls! Besides, I helped build it—I’d like to see it again.” It was surely a mark of the pain and distraction in the Minister’s mind that only Ari grasped the significance of this revelation. The name of the infamous prison escaped the young man’s open mouth like an involuntary burp. The Marlboro Man clapped Ari on the back, congratulating him for solving such a jolly riddle. “Thirty years we’ve been trying to get out of that place—and then the Lord himself goes and does it for us. Down went the walls—flat as a pancake! What a thing! Anyone still on his feet simply walked out into the sunshine and looked up at the clear blue sky. . . . Ah!” He stretched his arms across the back seat. The Minister was put in mind of a holiday-maker settling into a sand dune. “All criminal fugitives will be executed,” the Minister said, reduced to repeating what he had heard on the news. “Their only chance is to hand themselves over to the authorities.” “The way I see it,” the Marlboro Man said, “this is a moment of opportunity—for both of us.” He winked, then picked up the Minister’s left hand and pressed it down on the Minister’s knee until he yelped in pain. “It’s all a question of timing. The thing I’ve always admired about you, Minister, is your timing. You’ve always known when to move. Always known when a reckoning is coming. And you see it, don’t you? You see that the people have begun to smell your shit—and it’s not so sweet! Ha-ha! Finally, they can smell it. I mean, they’ve always smelled it, but back then they were children—we were children!—and now they are grown and not afraid to say it to your face. Any day now. Next year, they’d have had the lot of you in cuffs, off to The Hague! So it’s lucky: the wind came, just in the nick of time! Eh? The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want! It’s an opportunity, and you’re taking it. Listen, I admire it! I am a student of history—now, don’t laugh. I tell you, a man gets a lot of time to read in that little cell. I’ve been trying to educate myself. I want to be one step ahead of history—that’s the game, isn’t it? Maybe I don’t play it as well as you. But I’m learning. Oh, yes, I’ve become quite the student of history.” It was madness, of course, and the Minister did not imagine that Ari would make much sense of it, but, at the same time, it was unfortunate that within this man’s madness he should have hit upon that particular phrase, so like the Minister’s own, and keep repeating it, with that idiotic, implicating grin, which necessitated, the Minister now felt, a restatement of his own position, lest Ari should hear echoes where none existed. “I, meanwhile, am a student of human nature.” With his free hand, the Minister tried to hold his crushed elbow together. “And students of human nature understand that ungrateful children always revert to their parents’ wisdom, in the end.” “Ah . . .” Under the Caesar hairline, the man’s granite forehead wrinkled, and the tip of his tongue poked out from between his lips, like a schoolboy engaged in a fearful piece of calculation. Observing this effort, a village thought now came to the Minister—a memory, really, of the Devil as a young man. Tales concerning the childhood of the Devil were a specialty of his people; Elena had a wonderful way with them, turning them into bedtime stories for the Minister’s children—a rather low-class habit of which the Minister was supposed to disapprove. Unlike his colleagues, however, and unlike his difficult wife, the Minister of the Interior was essentially a pragmatist: if it were up to him, political men would never cross the thresholds of either bedrooms or shrines. He believed in leaving people to their private fantasies. When his children were small, he liked to open the door to his study at night, slicing through envelopes with a pearl-handled knife, while listening to Elena’s Devil-talk. In these tales the Devil was never quite an idiot, no, not quite. He was like this fellow to the Minister’s left. A good student, very attentive, eager to get on, who nevertheless always learned the wrong lesson. “Weren’t we children?” the man cried suddenly, bringing his fist down heavily on the upholstery. “And weren’t we ungrateful? Then we became the fathers in our turn. That’s the truth of it. Yes, we were young—we were heroes! But we’re not long-haired anymore, my brother. Yet we survived. Most people didn’t. So that’s to be celebrated. That’s a sign. Do you see? You must see that. You and I! Survivors!” The thud on the seat continued to radiate through the Minister’s elbow. “I do not see,” he whispered. “I do not see, because there is no analogy at all between us. I am the Minister of the Interior. You are insane. Perhaps once you were one of us—or worked for us. I don’t know. You say you did. Now you are only a criminal. A fugitive and a criminal. ” Through his agony, the Minister was able to feel some satisfaction at having hit the mark. For an abashed expression passed over the Marlboro Man’s face. To hide it, he turned from the Minister to face the window. “Oh, I meant no offense, Minister, none at all. All I mean to say is—excuse me if I’m not speaking in an elegant way—you were smart and we were stupid. That’s all. And let me tell you, you were really admired in there, truly. Much more than the Prime Minister. Because we remembered that you were once one of us! Smarter than us, maybe, but one of us all the same. But him? Never, not really. For he never really got his hands dirty. Not like we did. And now they call us ‘mercenaries’ and put us in prison and pretend they never knew us. But without men like us where was the victory? Answer me that. That boy took the glory, but it was others who did the work. He was just a pretty face. Like this one here.” He reached forward, horribly animated, and grabbed Ari’s cheek between thumb and forefinger. The car lurched toward a deep gully at the side of the road—the Minister’s turn to scream—before the Marlboro Man leaned all the way forward to seize the wheel briefly with his free hand, steering them true. “Don’t panic, don’t panic,” their captor said, fondly. He patted the top of frantic Ari’s head, sighed, and sank his great buttocks back into the upholstery. “But you! That’s a lot of blood to wash off, brother. Oh, we never forgot. Hell of a lot of blood. A river of blood. I saw it, I was there. Up to the knees! Up to the knees!” The Minister, just now emerging from the brace position, looked up to find Ari eying him strangely in the mirror. Never mind that it was a grotesque exaggeration: a river, stained red with blood, is not the same as a river of blood. But the Minister had not forgotten, no, not the difficult things, nor did he, as so many did, exaggerate or obscure. He remembered perfectly well how the Prime Minister had looked at nineteen, marking out an ambush on a field map. He remembered how they had recruited from the villages, handing out guns to young thugs who could not even spell their own names. He remembered the two halves of a girl’s head, rolling down a riverbank through reeds into water. Divided, perhaps, by this very man’s machete. All their boys had fought like animals, at one point or another. But the Minister had never forgotten, either, the beauty and quiet triumph of the nights that had followed those bloody days. A different life. Sharing simple food in the moonlight, not only with the village thugs but with bold, intelligent young men, committed to the future of their nation and willing to risk anything for it—including the eternal pollution of their own skulls. “A sissy. Always with some sissy book in his back pocket. It should have been you, brother. Up to the knees!” So it goes. Together the Minister of the Interior and the thoughtful boy who would later give him that title had read a thrilling book by an American with a German name—Vonnegut! A tale of war. It had so electrified them at the time, and yet, forty years later, the Minister found that he retained only one sentence of it and could not even retrieve its title. But he remembered two young men bent over one battered paperback, under a tree in the cleared center of a village. Books had been important back then—they were always quoting from them. Long-haired boys, big ideas. These days, all the Prime Minister read was his bank statements. Yet, in essence, he was the same good and simple man, in the Minister’s view—naïve, almost, doglike in his loyalties and his hatreds. If you were on the right side of the Prime Minister, you stayed there. So, at least, it had been for the Minister. Whatever he had needed had always been granted, up to and including this evening’s flight. He had been lucky, always. “That’s lucky!” the man cried, and the Minister, yanked from his memories, began to fear that some form of voodoo was at work. “The water’s gone down! Look at that fat beautiful moon! We can take the bridge!” Over the last bridge they went. The small tent city that had sprung up around the airport lay before them. The knife reëmerged, this time held low, at Ari’s waist. At a makeshift checkpoint, Ari stuck the green government badge in the windscreen with a shaking hand, and they were waved through, instructed to follow a police car past the camp and its abject inhabitants. “Leave me anywhere here,” the Marlboro Man said. “Next to one with her legs open. ‘Let’s lift some skirts and make it hurt!’ Remember that old chant? And they’d all go running with their mothers into the bushes! Ha-ha! Now, don’t begrudge me that, Minister, please. You probably had some yesterday—but for me it’s been a little longer.” For a big man, he moved nimbly, passing himself over the Minister, opening the car door, and stepping down onto gravel, smiling all the while. The Minister closed the door behind him. “What the— What are you doing? Minister? Minister? He’s just walking away!” The Minister’s phone was cold in his hand. He watched the man stride into the crowd. He felt as if he were releasing the spirit of chaos into the world. But wasn’t it already here? All commercial flights had ceased. The tiny half-destroyed airport had become a base for aid workers, stranded journalists, sleeping soldiers. Only the runway still functioned. The few planes available had been chartered by the government, and passengers approached them by driving to a gate in the perimeter fence and having their documentation checked by yet more officials. When the Minister’s turn came, several young men approached the car, in uniform, or else in the dark-blue suits of the faithful. “This way, Minister, this way,” they said, hustling him out of the car. He was crossing the floodlit tarmac before he realized that he’d said no goodbyes to Ari, but when he turned to look back he could no longer even see the vehicle. Hundreds of people pressed against the chain-link fence, waving pieces of paper in the air, shouting and begging. Just outside the painted yellow line, along which the Minister had once liked to walk in his neat, upright way, wheeling a discreetly luxurious brown-and-gold suitcase behind him—just on the other side of this yellow line, instead of the usual bustle of baggage handlers and suitcases, there lay a young man in a yellow neon safety vest and ragged trousers, sleeping on the tarmac, his head resting on a boulder. “This plane, Minister. Keep to your left, Minister. Keep moving, Minister. Minister?” But someone was screaming his name, his given name, which he heard so rarely these days it stopped him now in his tracks. He swivelled to locate the source and soon found it, a clear head and shoulders above the majority of his diminutive countrymen. He was grinning the same stupid devilish grin and making the old gesture of solidarity, wildly above his head, with the crossed fists they had all once used to signify “You, too, are my brother.” “Arrest that man,” the Minister said, quietly, to the young aide beside him, who, either not hearing or not understanding, nodded twice and said, “This way, if you please, Minister.” Across the lake of tarmac, the Minister and the Marlboro Man locked eyes. “Bon Voi Yah Gee! Bon Voi Yah Gee!” Bon voyage. A phrase he’d probably only ever seen written down. Screaming it at the top of his lungs. And making that gesture, over and over, a gesture that, the Minister was painfully aware, had fallen out of fashion in recent times—in truth, had come to be reviled; the Minister himself had not performed it in many years. He could see people on either side of the lunatic hanging off his giant arms, cursing and abusing him. The Minister tried to remind himself that nothing horrifying was happening—he was merely being wished well on his trip by an idiot. Bon Voi Yah Gee! Bon Voi Yah Gee! He turned back to his handlers and once more attempted to give his instruction, but the jet’s engines started up, and all was lost in this fresh wall of noise, all except those ridiculous words, attending the Minister’s footsteps like an incantation of some kind, or the rungs of a ladder, ascending and descending both, depending. Bon Voi Yah Gee! Up to the knees! “This way, Minister. This way.” So many people seemed to be touching the Minister, guiding him, advising him, that he felt as if he were not so much walking as being carried. He stopped trying to speak. What point was there in words? Actions, only actions. A few feet from the stairs to the plane, he became aware of a sudden change in the light: an impudent gray cloud between the Minister of the Interior and that fat beautiful moon. Large warm raindrops big as acorns fell on his nose, on his single shoe, on his lapel, on the world. Rain fell off the curve of the plane in torrential sheets, rain rioted on the cheap tin roof of the airport, soaking the Minister to the skin, making it even harder to hear instructions, and then, just as abruptly, stopped. The cloud moved on, the moon returned. The Minister held his elbow together. He pressed his suit bag to his chest. “This way, Minister, this way.” The Minister shut his mouth and followed.

In less than a year, he’d lost his mother, his father, and, as he’d once and sometimes still felt Julia to be, the love of his life; and, during this year, or, he should say, during its suicidal aftermath, he’d twice admitted himself to the psychiatric ward at the University Hospital in Charlottesville, where, each stay, one in the fall and one the following summer, three mornings a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, he’d climbed onto an operating table and wept at the ceiling while doctors set the pulse, stuck electrodes to his forehead, put the oxygen meter on his finger, and then pushed a needle into his arm and instructed him, as the machines beeped and the anesthetic dripped down the pipette toward his vein, to count backward from a hundred; and now, another year later, he was on his way to the dump to throw out the drawings and paintings that Julia had made in the months when she was sneaking off to sleep with the man she finally left him to marry, along with the comic-book collection—it wasn’t a collection so much as a big box stuffed with comics—that he’d kept since he was a boy. He had long ago forgotten his old comics; and then, a few days before, he’d come across them on a dusty shelf at the back of the garage, while looking for a carton of ammo. It was a humid Saturday morning. Thunderstorms had come through in the early hours after dawn, but now the rain and wind had passed, and sunlight lit the puddles on the road and the silver roofs of the farmhouses and barns that flickered into view between the trees, as he steered the ancient blue Mercedes—it had been his father’s, and his grandfather’s before that—across the county he’d grown up in. Maybe on his way back home he’d stop at Fox Run Farm for a gallon of raw milk. Or no. He’d drink a glass or two and then, in a month, have to dig the rest out of the refrigerator and pitch it. He reminded himself to vacuum the living room and clean the downstairs toilet. His name was Billy French, and he was carrying a Browning .30-06 A-bolt hunting rifle in the trunk of the Mercedes. He wasn’t a gun nut, and he didn’t hunt. He was a sculptor and a middle-school art teacher. Every now and then, he liked to stop on his way home from school and shoot cans off the rotting fence posts that surrounded the unused cow pasture where, at sixteen, in the grass and weeds, he’d lost his virginity to Mary Doan. He hadn’t thought about Mary in ages, and then, recently, he’d run into her—surprise, surprise, after all these years—at a bar in the Valley. He’d recognized her right away—he remembered her limp—but it had taken her a couple of tries to remember his name. They’d had a laugh over that, and he’d bought her a drink, and she’d bought him one, and now she was coming across the mountain, she was coming that night for dinner. He’d told her seven-thirty. Ahead on the road, a tree limb was down. He was on a small rural route, a cut between two lanes, not much used. He stopped the Mercedes, unbuckled his seat belt, and got out. A locust bough had sheared off in the wind. The bough was long and twisting, green with crooked branches and smaller, thorny stems. His tree saw and his axe were back at the house, but it might be possible to drag the bough from the tip and more or less swing the whole thing—swing wasn’t the right word, maybe—over and around and off the road, enough at least for the car to pass. He reached through the leaves and grabbed a narrow stem that stuck up in the air. There were no flowers—it was late in the season for that—but the locust’s seedpods had begun to sprout, and many of these were scattered across the asphalt. He swatted a mosquito and got the branch in both hands. The wood was damp, and the end of the bough flexed and bent when he pulled. He moved down to a thicker part, planted his feet, and leaned back. After four or five difficult heave-hos, he’d opened enough clearance, he thought, to steer the car through. He was out of breath and his shirt was wet and sticky. He got in the driver’s seat and eased the Mercedes onto the oncoming side of the road. The ground sloped down from the road’s edge and the soil had taken on rain. As he was working his way around the branch, wheels partly on the shoulder, the car tipped to the left and then shifted further, and a piece of ground seemed to fall away underneath. It was startling: a little slide and the Mercedes plunged. Then the tires dug in, and, abruptly, a distance off the road and at a steep angle, the car settled and stopped. Billy pushed his foot against the brake. He gripped the steering wheel. When he took his hands off, he saw that he’d scraped his palms on the locust. He was bleeding. “Shit, fuck. Shit,” he said aloud. He turned off the engine. He hadn’t slept the night before. It wasn’t the thunder and lightning that had kept him up—he’d been going through the art works that Julia had left rolled in tubes or stacked against the wall in the upstairs bedroom that had been her studio. They were piled in the back seat now. The paintings, he thought, while sitting in the car perched on the berm, were not as strong as the drawings, which, though more or less precise studies for their oil counterparts, all rural Virginia scenes—trees in a field, a dying pond, a rotting house in a mountain hollow—nonetheless had about them, with their bold erasures and smudges and retraced pencil lines, the feeling of something abstract and, in comparison with the worked and reworked paintings, complexly three-dimensional. The paintings seemed to exist as strangely flat fields—they put Billy in mind of Early American naïve art—and, in looking at them and, back in the day, talking to Julia about them, he’d come to see how purposefully she distorted light and shadow. “I’m searching for something that isn’t quite there,” she’d once said. He was fearful of shifting his weight and starting another slide—the car had gone four or five feet already, and the embankment fell maybe ten more. He could hear running water. Was there a creek off in the woods? He knew this country, or thought he did, but it was always surprising him, just the same. He wiped his hands on his pants. Gently now, he ratcheted down the brake. He eased open the driver’s-side door. Anyway, her drawings and paintings—he knew better than to throw them out, but the fact of them in his house was terrible. He’d meant for some time to do something about them. At first, of course, he’d tried to get them back to her, but she’d told him—this was during one of their five or six phone conversations since her departure, two years earlier—that her old work was no longer meaningful or important to her. “I’m not doing that kind of painting anymore,” she’d said. “I’m engaged with a more total realism.” “Photo-realism?” he’d asked. “No, nothing like that.” He was standing in the kitchen in his socks and underwear, drinking bourbon and Coke—his mother’s drink. Ice rattled in the glass. The floor was brown and dirty, in need of mopping. Julia said, “Billy, you’re drinking.” Oh, God, how to get out of the Mercedes safely? The hillside was steep and the grass was wet. And what if he made it, with both feet firmly on the ground, and the car slid down on top of him? He pushed the car door open all the way and, clutching the doorframe for balance, tumbled out onto the incline. Fuck Julia. He could take her pictures and toss them into the woods right now. He had weed in the glove compartment. Might there be a stray Ativan or two in there as well? The thing to do was slog around to the uphill side, the passenger side, reach through the window, and feel around in the glove compartment for whatever he could find. But wouldn’t you know it? He got partway around the Mercedes, and the whole car seemed to shudder and tremble. Billy watched it start into another drop—it was as if the car were shaking its wheels free of the mire—and then down the grade it rumbled, through the mud and across the grass, sliding to a rest at last in a patch of milkweed at the foot of the hill. He felt a raindrop, and another. The clouds were not in sight yet, but Billy could sense the weight of low pressure bearing down. An emerald light was in the air. The birds and other animals had gone quiet; the world was still, as it can be when bad weather is coming. He was thinking of Mary. By the time he’d managed to have sex with Mary, back in high school—she was a senior and he was a junior, and that fact alone was thrilling—she’d already had one abortion and one marriage proposal. “Gentlemen, may I suggest peashooters at two paces, rather than peashooters at ten paces?”Buy the print » He half walked, half slid down the hill. The Mercedes was sitting in a gulch between the woods and the embankment. He heard running water again—the creek had to be close. He reached gently into his pocket and took out his phone. His hands were a cut-up mess. The garage he used for the Mercedes was on the other side of Charlottesville, close to Julia and Mark’s farm, and, anyway, too far away for a tow truck to come. Could he drive back up to the road? It didn’t look to Billy as if there’d be much room to maneuver. Daily life’s frustrations, even the big ones, no longer ruled him, not the way they had for a long time in his life. He’d been psychotic with agitation that had grown from his grief, and it was hard for him to remember what that had been like, exactly: not the grief—he had plenty of that still—but the urge to die. He’d got all but there. He’d had the Browning loaded. He’d had it ready and at hand, a few times. He smelled storm. He might be able to drive for a while beside the road. The sun was high. Billy put his phone in his pocket and got back in the Mercedes. The car seemed all right. He drove slowly. He was in a wide but navigable trench. It wasn’t bad driving. The trench curved slowly around to the right, and then came to a straight section that reminded Billy of the Roman road that he and Julia had walked a length of during that difficult vacation in Italy, the winter before she left. They’d gone to see the paintings and frescoes of Tiepolo. Billy had become vocal about Tiepolo after seeing “Bacchus and Ariadne” in Washington, and Julia had got into him, too. After Christmas in Rome, they had taken the train north to Venice, and had spent a week walking around in the cold, searching out churches and palazzos and wandering the Gallerie dell’Accademia, where they had both become enchanted, though for different reasons, with “The Rape of Europa.” Julia got excited over the distant meeting of clouds and sea in the picture’s right-hand corner, while Billy fixated on the encroaching cloud plume to the left, the spire of pink and gray—it looked to him like a mushroom cloud—exploding upward from behind the rocky outcropping on which Zeus, transformed into a bull, seduces the Phoenician princess Europa, dressed in white and attended by ladies-in-waiting. The cloud threatens to wipe them all out, but Europa and her entourage seem either unconcerned or unaware. She sits enthroned on the back of Zeus. Two other bulls wait nearby. A maid tends to Europa’s hair, and another bathes her feet; shepherds and an African are on hand, and putti fly about and urinate from on high, and a black bird perches on a strange little cumulus cloud that has floated in over the princess’s head. There was the creek. It came out of the woods and flowed into a concrete drainpipe that tunnelled under the road. A stretch near the trees looked fordable. He could angle the car just so, over and between the rocks. Once he got to the other side, though, where was he going to go? Trees pushed against the embankment, and the way was overgrown. Billy nosed the car forward anyway. He felt a curiosity. The undercarriage of the Mercedes was not high, and when the wheels dropped into the water Billy heard and felt the bumper scrape the rocks. He jerked the car, not across but up the creek—maybe he could follow it out into a field or a yard somewhere upstream. The retirement home where his parents had ended their lives was up the way he’d come that morning, not on the little lane but on the bigger road at the end of it, heading down from the hills toward town. He saw lightning in the distance, and peered through the windshield at the dark clouds now crossing the sky over Afton Mountain. He turned on the headlights and the wipers. In the hospital, he’d had hallucinations. He remembered looking in his bathroom mirror—it was made of metal, not glass—and seeing his face deformed. He’d known better than to believe what he saw, but, on the other hand, he hadn’t known better, far from it: there it had been in front of him, his bent, misshapen skull. Now, as he drove into the forest, Billy recalled that, for a long time, the time of the locked ward and his sick brain and the torn-up suicide notes to Julia, he’d felt the burning. He’d felt it in his temple. It was, somehow, he knew, both imaginary and real, a beckoning, an itch, a need for a bullet. Of course he’d thought always of the Browning, of loading it and getting into position on the living-room floor, or maybe out back in the barn, maybe laying down a tarp first. The barn on the hill behind his house—that was where he made his art. When he wasn’t teaching seventh graders how to draw, he made big untidy installations that he referred to as his trash heaps. Along with the rifle and the comics and Julia’s art, he had in the back of the Mercedes a canvas bag with about two dozen cans that he’d saved from trips to the shooting pasture. He was planning to include them in a piece. He needed more, but he didn’t eat much canned food, and his personal use of the materials in his work was crucial to him. The thing about Mary was that her limp looked good. It wasn’t a very noticeable limp. One of her legs was shorter than the other. Billy remembered her swaggering down the hall in high school, thirty years before. Her father had been a country doctor, the sort who got out of bed and drove into the hills at all hours to treat people who couldn’t pay or get down the mountain to town. Mary was a year older than Billy, but she’d let him put his hands down her pants. He’d ridden his bike up Route 250, past the Episcopal church, to her house. There was never anyone home but her. She’d been provocative and graceful and unembarrassed. He remembered her standing on her short leg, the other leg propped out at an angle, toes touching the floor, a dancer’s pose. What he needed to do was fix up the car. It was a 1958 220S with a white roof and a gray interior, and there had been rust on the body and the chrome and underneath, on the chassis, for a long time. Billy wasn’t a car buff, and didn’t know what this one might be worth cleaned up. People had offered to buy it. He remembered riding in it with his grandfather, who never drove faster than twenty-five miles per hour. His grandfather had told stories, actually, of driving his old Ford up creek beds, back in the thirties. Billy urged the car up a mossy rise and over a little waterfall. Branches scraped the roof. After Julia left, in his worsening he’d walked and moved as if crushed by some stronger form of gravity. The air had pressed him down, and he could not get out from under it. Some days, he’d curled in a ball on the floor and promised himself that soon, soon, soon—it would be his gift to himself—he’d walk up to the barn and lie down with the rifle. The car was swamped. Or it wasn’t, exactly, but the creek had risen and the tires now made a wake. The Mercedes didn’t have much acceleration, and the steering felt loose. Billy powered over a high rock, or maybe a tree root—it was hard to see—then, suddenly, precipitately, the wheels dropped in front and the car slammed down and stopped. Billy pressed the gas. The motor raced and the car shook but didn’t move. He gave the engine gas again, and the rear wheels spun, churning the creek and throwing mud. He put the lever in park. Lightning hit, close and loud. Billy reached across the seat, opened the glove compartment, and felt around for the pot. There was the registration paperwork, and there was a pill bottle, his Ativan; and there were his pliers (he’d recently begun preparing the cans, tearing and disfiguring them before shooting), and the joint and the lighter, and the driving gloves that his grandfather had worn and that Billy’s father had kept in the car after Billy’s grandfather died, and that Billy had left there after his own father died. He took the gloves out and felt how old they were, then worked his hands into them. On or off—he wasn’t sure what felt better. He put the pills in his shirt pocket, turned off the ignition and the wipers and the lights. He remembered how the misery had bowed him over: he’d gone everywhere, in those days, with his head down, barrelling rigidly forward, compounding the pain by moving at all; but when he touched himself to find where the pain was coming from he couldn’t find the spot. It was dark in the woods without the headlights. He lit the joint and the car glowed inside. Julia’s paintings were in back. She worked with tiny brushes, and he’d wondered, sometimes, when he saw her at it, what she was thinking while she slowly built up the paint on the canvas. He exhaled smoke and watched the saplings at the edge of the creek bend in the surge. Buy the print » She’d talked to him, as they stood together at the Accademia, gazing at “The Rape of Europa,” about the singular cloud hovering over Europa, its complete non-relation to the more natural-seeming clouds that dominate the painting as a whole, the delicate, pale clouds on the horizon, the spire of darker cloud rising up behind the rocks. “Everything is off in Tiepolo,” she’d said. “Spatial relations don’t cohere. It isn’t simply that people fly with angels through the air. What world are we looking at? The paintings at all points lead the eye toward infinity.” She might have been anticipating his own predicament, his own crisis of perception, when, nine months later, and again the following year, he’d lain on the operating table, crying and holding the nurse’s hand, while the doctors got him ready. The hospital ceiling was white foam tile with fluorescent lights, and the doctors had looked to Billy as if they were levitating beneath them, beneath the lights—as if they, the doctors, had descended from heaven to perform electroconvulsive therapy. Someone was coming toward the car. A figure moved between the trees beside the creek. It was a boy carrying an umbrella. He was skinny and wore jeans and no shirt. He stepped down to the bank and splashed across to the car with the umbrella over his head. Billy rolled down the window, and the rain swept in, drenching him. “Are you the doctor?” the boy said. “Doctor?” Billy said. “Luther said he saw car lights. We prayed you’d come. Are you smoking pot?” “I’m stuck on this rock,” Billy said. “I see that,” the boy said. “I was making good progress, and the next thing I knew the wheels were spinning.” “Creeks aren’t the best for driving in a storm,” the boy said. Billy rolled up the car window. He opened the door and put out his foot. The rock was massive and slick; the creek was about to overtake it. He eased himself out and stood clear of the car. He was still wearing his grandfather’s driving gloves, and holding the joint. He lowered one foot into the creek, leaped in, and lunged toward the bank, where his feet sank into the wet earth. “I’m fine,” he said. “I made it.” “Don’t you have your doctor’s bag?” the boy asked. He looked to be twelve or thirteen, the age of Billy’s students, but Billy didn’t recognize him. “It’s our mother,” the boy said. “Your mother?” “She’s up that way.” He held the umbrella over Billy, who said, “What’s wrong with her?” “It’s cancer.” “I’m sorry,” Billy said. “She’s up here,” the boy said. There was no need to lock the car or take the key. Billy put the joint in his shirt pocket with the pills—it would get soaked; he should have left it in the car, but there was nothing he could do about that now—and said, “I doubt I’ll be able to help her. I want you to know that,” and then followed anyway, a few steps behind the boy, to the place where the boy had crossed the creek on his way down. Billy watched the boy wade through the water, and then slogged in after him. The creek here was deep and fast. The car would be all right or not. Billy leaned against the torrent and struggled up onto the bank, and then he and the boy pushed ahead, slipping in the mud and on the mossy ground, pushing branches away from their faces. Once, Billy stumbled, and the boy held the umbrella over him while he got up. The umbrella was torn and bent, and water poured down it onto Billy’s neck. They went over a rise, and then walked down along what looked like a lane—maybe the land had been cleared at one time—a grassy, open promenade between the trees. The lane led into a hollow. There was a cabin, a shed, really, with a sinking roof and small square windows and a chimney overtaken by ivy. The cabin featured a porch, though not much was left of that, only a few boards elevated on piled stones, with no steps leading up from the yard to the door. The cabin had two front doors, oddly—one beside the other. Billy didn’t see an actual road, or a car parked nearby, but there was trash littering the ground. The boy hopped onto the porch, closed and shook the umbrella, and stomped clay from his shoes. Billy climbed onto the porch—he had to heave himself up—and kicked the red mud off his own heels. The boy pushed open the door on the left. “I brought the doctor,” he called inside. “Show him in,” a man answered. The boy held the door. Billy had to duck under the frame. Water ran from every part of him. The floor inside was missing in places, and the air felt cold, like a draft from underground. Water dripped through the roof. Two windows, one in the rear and one on the side of the cabin, let in faint light—their panes, if they’d ever had any, were gone. Billy’s eyes were adjusting. The cabin seemed bigger from inside than from out. As he came in, he saw, to the left of the door, a tumble of bags and suitcases. A dividing wall ran down the middle of the cabin, splitting the space—that explained the two front doors—and there was an interior door, partway down the dividing wall, leading to the cabin’s right-hand side. The room on the left, the one he was in, might have been ten feet wide by thirteen or fourteen feet deep. The fireplace and the chimney were over in the other half. Billy saw a bed pushed up under the window at the back of the cabin. A woman was lying in it, and a man stood over her. The man spoke to the boy on the porch, “Caleb, put down that umbrella and get the doctor something to dry himself.” Billy heard the other front door open and close, and he heard the sounds of the boy moving behind the dividing wall. Billy could feel his footfalls travelling through the floorboards. “She’s struggling,” the man said to Billy. The bed was an old iron thing with a mattress on top. The woman had a coat draped over her, and a bundle of clothes for a pillow. Rain spattered the windowsill above the bed but didn’t seem to be getting on her. “We’ve moved her from corner to corner, all night, except where the floor’s out. The water follows her,” the man explained. “It’s been quite the storm,” Billy said. He picked his way across the damaged floor to the bedside. His shoes squished. “Don’t fall through,” the man said. The man was bald and hadn’t shaved—he wore the shadow of a beard. It was hard to tell if he was old, or maybe just Billy’s age, and he spoke with an accent that reminded Billy of the Appalachian mountain speech he’d heard when he was a boy, but which, even so, he couldn’t place—it wasn’t local. “I’ll be careful,” Billy said. He felt as if he were seeing through a fog. The splashing rain on the windowsill made a mist in the air, but it was also the pot, deranging his balance, his sense of perspective. At the bedside, Billy leaned down and saw the woman shudder beneath the coat that was covering her. Then she was still. The door in the dividing wall opened, and the boy appeared and handed him a damp, dirty piece of cloth, a towel, of sorts. “Thank you,” Billy said. The man said to the boy, “Go find your brother and tell him the doctor’s arrived.” The boy left the room through the front door. To Billy, the man said, “We didn’t mean to be staying here.” They stood over the woman on the bed. Why were there no chairs? Everything looked wrecked and rotten. Billy went down on his knees. The man said, “I know there’s nothing to be done,” and knelt, too. The woman’s eyes were closed and her mouth was open. Her skin seemed stretched, and her lips were parched. The man told Billy that she’d taken neither food nor water for some time. He and Billy faced each other over her. There was a moment when Billy’s heart raced. The man studied him. Billy looked down. The man said, “You’re not a doctor, are you?” “No, I’m not. I’m sorry.” “But you’re here.” Billy explained, “I teach junior high over in Crozet. I was on my way to the dump to throw some things out.” “The dump’s not up here.” “The road was blocked. I took the creek and wrecked on the rocks.” Billy heard footsteps on the porch. The door opened and the cabin shook as Caleb and his brother came in. The brother was bigger than Caleb, older, and wore a dark shirt. They stood dripping side by side at the foot of the bed, and Billy remembered sitting at his own mother’s deathbed, feeding her a mixture of morphine drops and Ativan, squeezing her hand, and telling her he would miss her, while her breaths came farther and farther apart. The woman on the bed inhaled. Her dark hair was fanned out around her head. The man told the boys, “I want you two to go down to the creek and bring the doctor’s car.” “It’s stuck,” Caleb said. “That’s what the doctor told me,” the man said, and added, “The doctor and I will stay with her.” “The flood may have washed it away,” Caleb said. “Go see. Go on.” The brothers backed away from the bed. The man asked Billy his name, and, in that moment, Billy could not say—he felt too dizzy to speak. He raised one hand and pulled the coat more neatly and more fully across the woman, tucking the collar around her neck; the tail reached almost to her feet. He saw that she was wearing socks. Her feet were tiny. He was shaking. He tried to take a deeper breath. He felt his grandfather’s gloves shrinking and tightening as they dried on his hands. “I can help her,” he said finally. Light came dully through the window, and seemed to drip down between the beams overhead. Billy listened to the softening rain. He reached inside his shirt pocket and clumsily got hold of the pill bottle. He said, “This will help her rest.” “Your people will remember you for the money you saved them by building a pyramid.”Buy the print » It took him some time to open the cap. He peered down into the bottle. There was a handful of pills. He thought to take one himself, maybe more than one. But there were so few; he didn’t. Instead, he asked the man, “Do you have any water?” “Water?” the man said. “Is there a tap?” “No,” the man said. “There’s a pump out back.” Billy held the open bottle in one hand. With his other hand, he reached up to the window. He stuck his hand out to catch the rain in the bottle cap. He said to the man, “I want you to watch what I’m doing.” Then he held the bottle cap over the woman’s mouth. He let a drop, and another, fall. He shook a pill from the bottle. “Like this,” he said. He leaned over the woman. He held the pill unsteadily between his thumb and forefinger, between the raised seams at the fingertips of his glove. He tucked the pill beneath the woman’s lower lip, near her cheek, and then reached up and caught more rain. “Give her water with the pill.” He shook the cap dry, then put it back on the bottle and told the man to give her four or five a day. “There should be enough here to get her through,” he said. “Thank you for your kindness,” the man said. After a moment, Billy left the bedside. He stepped across the broken floor planks and opened the front door. Thunder rolled in the far distance. He stood on the porch, in the drizzle, and tried to stop trembling. It isn’t the shock. It’s the brain seizure, brought on by the shock. Atropine goes in, to keep the heart working. The anesthetic follows, and, after that, succinylcholine, which paralyzes the body. Life support is necessary. A blood-pressure cuff inflated tightly around one ankle keeps the succinylcholine out of the foot, which, when the shock is given, shows the seizure as twitching toes. The head and the heart are wired: electroencephalograph to scalp; electrocardiograph to body. A bite plate goes between the teeth, and an oxygen mask covers the face. The anesthetic has a sweet smell; the patient loses consciousness ten or fifteen seconds after it enters the blood. That done, the doctor places the paddles against the forehead. Optimally, the seizure, the convulsion, should last twenty, thirty, forty seconds. Shorter or longer is less effective. There must be enough anesthetic in the blood to keep the patient unconscious but not so much that it soaks the brain and dampens the seizure. The anesthetic is short-lived, and the procedure is over in minutes. The anesthetic goes in, blackness comes, and then, suddenly, as if nothing had taken place, the nurse’s voice asks, “Can you tell me where you are?” He heard a noise and saw lights. It was the Mercedes, coming toward him along the avenue of trees. He stepped down off the porch, into the mud. The boy was driving. His brother sat beside him. The boy parked in front of Billy, like a valet at a restaurant. He rolled down the window and called, “We brought the car.” “You brought the car,” Billy said. “The flood almost took it down the mountain.” “I thought it surely would have.” “We got it in time,” the boy said, and Billy said, “Your mother is sleeping.” The boy got out, leaving the door open for Billy. “Come on,” he said to his brother. The hood and the roof were covered with leaves, and scratches and dents ran along the body of the car, where it had crunched onto the rock. The boy pointed. “Drive between the trees and don’t cross the creek. Follow the side of the mountain. Turn left at the train tracks. There’s a busted fence. Go through it and drive across the field. There’s an empty house and a pond. Go past the house to the gate. The road is on the other side.” “O.K.,” Billy said. He watched the brothers climb onto the porch, kick the mud off their shoes, and go through the right-side door into the cabin. Billy swept the leaves off the car with his hand—first the roof, then the hood—and pulled more from under the wipers. He got in the car. The rain had about stopped. He rolled up the window, just in case. His scraped hands hurt beneath the gloves, but he could hold the wheel. He drove out of the hollow, and the gray sky opened to view. He heard the rushing creek on his left, and kept going. It wasn’t long before he had to thread between trees and under branches. He saw only glimpses of sky. A deer jumped in front of the car and scared him, and several times he had to back up and redirect the Mercedes around fallen logs. He didn’t know how far he’d come, but he could feel the slope of the mountain rising beside him on his right. He was on the tracks before he saw them. They were ancient and broken, buried in the weeds. He turned left and followed them. The Mercedes bumped along over the crooked ties. After a mile or so, he saw the field and the fence that the boy had told him to look for, and, beyond the field, the empty house and the pond. He relaxed his grip on the wheel and took his time crossing the waterlogged grass. He stopped at the gate, put the lever in park, and got out. The gate was chained and locked. He yanked on the lock. “Fuck me,” he said, and walked back to the car. He opened the trunk and retrieved the Browning, unzipped the case, and removed the rifle. He took a bullet from the box and loaded the gun. He walked over and stood about ten feet from the gate, raised the rifle to his shoulder, and aimed. It took one shot. The lock jumped and settled. Billy expelled the shell, walked up to the gate, removed the shattered lock from the chain, unwrapped the chain from the fence, and pushed open the gate. He carried the gun, the chain, and the lock to the car. He put the Browning into its case, and the lock and the chain into the canvas bag full of cans. Before shutting the trunk, he walked back to where he’d fired the gun. It took him a minute to find the shell. He picked it out of the grass, then tossed it into the bag with the other things. Before closing the trunk, he opened his box of comic books. He didn’t take any out. He knew what they were, pretty much. He should have given them to the boys. He closed the trunk, took his phone from his pocket, got into the driver’s seat, pulled off one of his gloves, and dialled 911. The operator, a woman, said, “What is your emergency?” “I want to report a dying woman, a woman who’s dying,” he said. “Can you tell me your name, sir?” “My name is Billy French.” “Where are you located?” Billy looked about. He said, “I thought I was below Afton Mountain, but things don’t look right. I’m in a field. There’s a vacant house near a pond.” “Can you be more specific, sir?” Billy said, “She’s in a cabin on the mountain. There’s a man and two boys. You go through a field and along some rusted tracks. There’s a kind of lane or alley or something in the woods.” “I’ll need an address, sir.” “There is no address.” “I need to know where the woman is, sir,” the operator said. “I don’t know,” he said. “Sir?” “I’m not sure.” He hung up. He turned off the phone and put it in the glove compartment. He put the driving glove back on his hand. He buckled his seat belt, steered up to the road, and looked both ways. It was too late to make the trip to the dump. Mary was coming, and he had to get ready. He’d thought of braising rabbit. Did he still have time for that? Left or right? He turned the car to the left. As he drove, he decided that he would keep Julia’s paintings a while longer. He could clear some space in the attic, or stow them under a tarp in the barn. He went over and down a hill. He had the mountains on one side and a cow pasture on the other. The sky above the mountains glowed. Soon the sun would come out and the day would be blue again. He was certain that the road would lead him somewhere familiar if he drove long enough. He rolled down the window and felt the breeze on his face. The damp, shining road curved over the gentle foothills, and the trees alongside seemed to become greener and lusher in the growing light, and before long a car passed him going the other direction; and, a little farther down the road, he did in fact come upon a house that he recognized. He slowed the car and pulled into the driveway. How had he got so far from home? He was all the way up past White Hall. Soft white clouds and a few birds were in the air. The thunder and lightning were over at last. Billy circled the drive, eased the Mercedes to the road, checked both directions, and went back the way he’d come.

At first, it was great. Sure. It always is. She cuddled a frog, wishing for more, and—presto! A handsome prince who doted on her. It meant the end of her marriage, of course, but her ex was something of a toad himself, who had a nasty habit of talking with his mouth full and a tongue good for nothing but licking stamps. The prince was adorable—all the girls at the bridge club, squirming with envy, said so—though you could still see the effects his previous residence had had on him. He had heavy-lidded eyes and a wide mouth like a hand puppet’s, his complexion was a bit off, and his loose-fitting skin was thin and clammy. His semen had a muddy taste, like the pond he came from, and his little apparatus was disappointing, but his tongue was amazing. It could reach the deepest recesses, triggering sensations she’d never known before. His crown was not worn like a hat—it grew out of his head like horns and sometimes got in the way—but his tongue was long enough for detours and tickled other parts on the path in. It gave him not so much a lisp as a consonantal slurp, making gibberish out of his sweet nothings, but talking was never the main thing between them. She had discovered, when he was still an amphibian and they were just getting into the kissing game, that licking him would give her a stunning hallucinogenic high, and that was still true a metamorphosis later, but though she could get a buzz by licking the frog anywhere, she had to go looking for it on the prince, mostly in the nether parts. He wasn’t the cleanest of princes, but the trip was worth it. She was transported to another realm, a kind of fairy kingdom where she could have anything she desired: wealth, beauty, a spectacular wardrobe, a winning bridge hand, cream-filled chocolates with zero calories, and love whenever she wanted it, which was most of the time, even when she was doing other things, like presiding over a royal banquet or reviewing the palace guard. Just wham, bam, grand slam! Glorious! It all tended to vanish when the high wore off, but another lick and she was back again. Her suburban life began to pale by comparison, but whenever she asked the prince to transport her to his real kingdom he always took her back to the pond where she’d found him. He was very happy there. He’d crawl into the mud, digging in until only his protruding eyes peered out, his crown seeming to float on the surface. At home, his eyes were sometimes wide awake and popping; at other times, especially when he was eating, they sank away and almost disappeared. But at the pond he was always goggle-eyed. Now and then he would unfurl his tongue and burp and she would get into the mud with him. It wasn’t the same as the hallucinatory kingdom, but it was still very nice. His frequent burping blighted his regal dignity somewhat, but at the same time it was the most lovable thing about him, and when he burped he always gazed at her in an especially affectionate way. When he was still a frog, he had taken his skin off from time to time to eat it. Fortunately, the prince did not do that, though his long tongue did snap up anything that dripped or flaked off, which sometimes spoiled her appetite. About once a month, he removed his clothes and crawled up on her back and locked his skinny legs around her for several days, his long toes fondling her bosom, his padded thumbs stuck to her armpits like Velcro. She couldn’t shake him off, but had to wait until whatever it was that he was doing was done. It was probably obscene, though thankfully she couldn’t see it; certainly she had to launder her skirts and blouses afterward. It was difficult with the prince pasted to her back even to do her shopping or get her hair done, and she had to sit sideways on chairs and on the toilet. But the worst thing about these times was that she lost access to her high. If only she had a tongue like his! As soon as he dismounted and before he could put his royal pantaloons on, she’d get her nose right down there, drug fiend that she was, and lick her way back to the fairy kingdom. And on one such day (or night, one could never be sure in that place) when she was pinned, spread-eagled, by croquet wickets on the sunny (moonlit?) palace lawn for the pleasure of all, her euphoric self included—goodness! she was popping like his eyes did—he asked her in his slurping way if she was happy where she was. Oh, yes, totally! she exclaimed breathlessly, so he left her there and, if she understood him correctly, went back to the pond to crawl into the mud. Well, she missed him, just as she missed her friends at the bridge club and, truth be told, her ex as well, but she was having too much wild royal fun to think about it, or to think about anything, really, highs being like that. It was fantastic and seemingly unending, but, alas, nothing lasts forever, least of all ecstasy, and so one day there she was at home again, lying like a deflated air bag on her filthy kitchen floor. She mopped the floor, bagged up the mess in the refrigerator, opened all the windows, and hurried back to the pond, looking for the prince. She chased burps all day and all night, but he was nowhere to be found. The weather had changed. Perhaps he was hibernating. For a lonely year she kept up the search, at first somewhat desperately, kissing and licking any frogs she managed to catch, but eventually she resigned herself to the futility of her quest and sorrowfully abandoned it. She recalled then the prince’s own sorrow and disappointment. He’d thought this would be more fun, he’d confessed to her once in the mud. Of course, she’d been hurt by that and had pretended not to hear him, but she understood now, as she should have understood then, that he had been not an enchanted prince turned into a frog but a frog turned into a prince, and all he’d wanted was to be a frog again. In the end, she got in touch with her ex and told him that she had been hooked on a weird drug but had kicked it now, and if he’d like to come back she’d welcome him. He was also lonely, smoking and drinking too much, his own affairs having come to nothing, and so, gratefully, he returned, and they found a certain contentment, living more or less happily ever after, which is what “now” is while one’s in it.

As far back as I can remember, my parents have bothered each other. In India, we lived in two concrete rooms on the roof of a house. The bathroom stood separate from the living quarters. The sink was attached to one of the exterior walls. Each night, my father would stand before the sink, the sky above him full of stars, and brush his teeth until his gums bled. Then he would spit the blood into the sink and turn to my mother and say, “Death, Shuba, death. No matter what we do, we will all die.” “Yes, yes, beat drums,” my mother said once. “Tell the newspapers, too. Make sure everyone knows this thing you have discovered.” Like many people of her generation, those born before Independence, my mother viewed gloom as unpatriotic. To complain was to show that you were not willing to accept difficulties, that you were not willing to do the hard work that was needed to build the country. My father was only two years older than my mother. Unlike her, he saw dishonesty and selfishness everywhere. Not only did he see these things but he believed that everybody else did, too, and that people were deliberately not acknowledging what they saw. My mother’s irritation at his spitting blood he interpreted as hypocrisy. My father was an accountant. He had wanted to immigrate to the West ever since he was in his early twenties, ever since America liberalized its immigration policies in 1965. His wish rose out of self-loathing. Often when he walked down the street in Delhi, he would feel that the buildings he passed were indifferent to him, that he mattered so little to them that he might as well not have been born. Because he attributed this feeling to his circumstances—and not to the fact that he was the sort of person who sensed buildings’ having opinions—he believed that if he were somewhere else, especially somewhere where he was paid in dollars and thus was rich, he would be a different person and one whose life had meaning. Another reason he wanted to emigrate was that he saw the West as glamorous with the excitement of science. In India in the fifties, sixties, and seventies, radios, televisions, and cars were not just expensive objects but seen as almost supernatural. I remember that when we turned on the radio in our apartment, as the vacuum tubes warmed up, first the voices would sound far away and then they would rush at us, and this was thrilling, as if the machine were making some special effort for us. Of everybody in my family, my father loved science the most. He tried to bring it into his life by going to medical clinics and having his urine tested. He loved clinics and doctors’ offices. Of course, hypochondria had something to do with this; my father suspected that there was something wrong with him and that it might be something physical. Also, sitting in the clinics and talking to doctors in lab coats, he felt that he was close to important things, that what the doctors were doing was the same as what doctors would do in England or Germany or America, that he was already there in those foreign countries. My mother had no interest in emigrating for herself. She was a high-school economics teacher, and she liked her job. But she thought that the West would provide me and my brother, Birju, with opportunities. Then came the Emergency. Indira Gandhi suspended the Constitution and put thousands of politicians and journalists in jail. My parents, like almost everyone who had seen Independence come, were very loyal; they were the sort of people who looked up at a cloud and thought, That’s an Indian cloud. After the Emergency, however, they began to think that even though they were ordinary and unlikely to get into political trouble, it might still be better to emigrate. I used to assume that my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose. When he got home in the evening, all he did was sit in his chair in the living room, drink tea, and read the paper. Often he looked angry. By the time we left for America, when I was eight and Birju was twelve, I knew that the government had not assigned him to live with us. Still, I continued to think that he served no purpose. My father, who had gone to America a year before us, was waiting for us in the arrivals hall at the airport. He was leaning against a metal railing and looking irritated. The sight of him made me anxious. The apartment he had rented was in a tall, brown brick building in Queens. The gray metal front door swung open into a foyer with a wooden floor. Beyond this was a living room with a reddish-brown carpet that went from wall to wall. I had never seen a carpet, except in movies. Birju and my parents walked across the foyer and into the living room. I went to the carpet’s edge and stopped. A brass strip held the carpet to the floor. I took a step forward, trying not to put my weight down. I felt as if I were stepping onto a painting. My father took us to the bathroom to show us toilet paper and hot water. Whereas my mother was interested in status—in being better educated than others or being considered more respectable—my father was simply interested in having more things. I think this was because while both of my parents had grown up poor, my father’s childhood had been more desperate. At some point, my father’s father had begun to believe that thorns were growing out of his palms. He had taken a razor and picked at his hands until they were shaggy with scraps of skin. Because of my grandfather’s problems, my father had grown up feeling that no matter what he did people would look down on him. As a result, he cared less about trying to convince people of his merits and more about just possessing things. The bathroom was narrow. It had a tub, a sink, and a toilet in a row along one wall. My father reached between Birju and me and turned on the tap. Hot water came shaking and steaming into the basin. He stepped back and looked at us to gauge our reaction. “Ow! Don’t smush so hard, meatball!”Buy the print » I had never seen hot water coming from a tap before. In India, in the winter, my mother used to get up early to heat pots of water on the stove so that we could bathe. Watching the hot water spill out, as if there were an endless supply, I had the sense of being in a fairy tale, one of those stories with a jug that is always full of milk or a bag of food that never empties. That night, I went to bed on a mattress in the living room—the apartment had one bedroom, where my parents slept. Even in my sleep I was aware that I was in America. As the days passed, the wealth of this new country continued to astonish me. There were programs on television from morning until night. In our shiny brass mailbox in the lobby, we received ads on colored paper. The sliding glass doors of our apartment building would open when we approached. Each time they did this, I felt that we had been mistaken for somebody important. My father, who had seemed pointless in India, had brought us to America and now we were rich. The fact that he had achieved this made him seem different, mysterious. All the time now he was saying things that revealed him as knowledgeable. In India, my mother had been the one who made all the decisions concerning Birju and me. Now I realized that my father, too, had opinions about us. This felt both surprising and intrusive, like being touched by a relative you don’t know well. My father took Birju and me to a library. I had been in two libraries before then. One, in a small noisy room next to a barbershop, had had newspapers but not books and had been used primarily by people searching the employment ads. The other had been on the second floor of a temple, and had had books, but they were kept locked in glass-fronted cabinets. The library in Queens was bigger than either of the ones I had seen. It had several rooms, and thousands of books. The librarian said that we could check out as many as we wanted. I did not believe this at first. My father told Birju and me that he would give us fifty cents for each book we read. This bribing struck me as un-Indian and wrong. My mother had told us that Americans were afraid to demand things from their children. She’d said that this was because American parents did not care about their children and were unwilling to do the hard work of disciplining them. If my father wanted us to read, what he should do was threaten to beat us. I wondered whether my father had become too American during the year that he had lived alone. I wanted to check out ten picture books. My father said, “You think I am going to give you money for such small books?” My mother, Birju, and I had taken everything we could from the airplane: red Air India blankets, pillows with paper pillowcases, headsets, sachets of ketchup, packets of salt and pepper, airsickness bags. Birju and I used the blankets until they frayed and tore. Around that time, we started going to school. I had a shy nature. “You are a tiger at home,” my mother said, “and a cat outside.” At school, I sat at the very back of the class, in the row closest to the door. Often I could not understand what my teacher was saying. I had studied English in India, but either my teacher spoke too quickly and used words I did not know or else I was so afraid that her words sounded garbled to my ears. It was strange to be among so many whites. They all looked alike. When a boy spoke to me between periods, it would take me a moment to realize that I had talked to him before. The school was three stories tall, with hallways that looped on themselves and stairways connecting the floors like a giant game of snakes and ladders. Not only could I not tell white people apart but I often got lost trying to find my classroom. Soon I became so afraid of getting lost in the vastness of the school that I wouldn’t leave the classroom when I had to use the toilet. We had lunch in an asphalt yard surrounded by a high chain-link fence. Wheeled garbage cans were spread around the yard. I was often bullied. Sometimes a little boy would come up to me and tell me that I smelled bad. Then, if I said anything, a bigger boy would appear so suddenly that I couldn’t tell where he had come from. He’d knock me down, then stand over me, fists clenched, and demand, “You want to fight? You want to fight?” Sometimes boys surrounded me and shoved me back and forth, keeping me upright as a kind of game. Often, standing in a corner of the asphalt yard, I would think, There has been a mistake. I am good at cricket. I am good at marbles. I am not the sort of boy who is pushed around. For me, the two best things about America were television and the library. Every Saturday night, I watched “The Love Boat.” I looked at the women in their one-piece bathing suits and their high heels and imagined what it would be like when I was married. I decided that when I was married I would be very serious, and my silences would lead to misunderstandings between me and my wife. We would have a fight and later make up and kiss. She would be wearing a white swimsuit as we kissed. Before coming to America, I had never read a book just to read it. At first, when I began doing so, whatever I read seemed obviously a lie. If a book said that a boy walked into a room, I was immediately aware that there was no boy and there was no room. Still, I read so much that I began to imagine myself in the books I read. I imagined being Pinocchio, swallowed by a whale. I wished to be inside a whale with a candle burning on a wooden crate, as in the illustration. Vanishing into books, I felt held. While I was at school or walking down the street, there seemed no end to the world; when I read a book or watched “The Love Boat,” the world felt simple and understandable. Birju liked America much more than I did. In India, he had not been very popular. Here he made friends quickly. He was in seventh grade and his English was better than mine. Also, he was kinder than he had been in India. In India, there had been such competition, so many people offering bribes to get their children slightly better grades, that he was always on edge. Here, doing well seemed as simple as studying. “He hasn’t given me a drawer yet, but I do have a designated outlet for my charger.”Buy the print » My school was on the way to Birju’s and Birju used to walk me there every day. One morning, I started crying and told him about the bullying. He suggested that I talk to our parents. When I did not, he told them himself. My father came to school with me. I had to stand at the front of the class and point at all the boys who had shoved me or threatened me. After this, the bullying stopped. I had been angry that Birju had told our parents. I had not thought that this would make a difference. The fact that it did surprised me. My mother took a job in a garment factory. The morning that she was to start, she came into the living room wearing jeans. I had never seen her in something form-fitting before. Birju and I were sitting on a mattress. “Your thighs look like turnips,” Birju said. My mother started screaming, “Die, murderer, die!” Birju laughed and I laughed, too. In India, when my father said that we should do something, we wouldn’t really start doing it until our mother had decided whether it should be done. In America, our parents had closer to equal authority. My father had all sorts of plans for us. Mostly, these involved ways to assimilate. He made us watch the news every evening. This was incredibly boring. We didn’t care that there were hostages in Iran or that there was a movie called “The Empire Strikes Back.” He also bought us tennis racquets and took us to Flushing Meadows Park. There, he made us hit tennis balls, because he believed that tennis was a sport for rich people. My father was still irritable and suspicious, the way he had been in India, but he also had a certain confidence, as if no matter what happened he had done one thing that was uncontestably wonderful. “A green card is worth a million dollars,” he repeatedly told us. My relationship with Birju also changed. In India, my mother had come home around the same time that we did. Now Birju was expected to take care of me until she returned from work. He was supposed to boil frozen corn for me and try to make me drink a glass of milk. Then he was supposed to sit with me and watch me do my homework while he did his. Before we came to America, I had not paid much attention to the fact that Birju was older than I was. I had thought that he was bigger, but not more mature. Now I began to understand that Birju dealt with more complicated things than I did. One thing he had to deal with was my father’s desire for him to attend the Bronx High School of Science, where the son of a colleague had been accepted. To get into the Bronx High School of Science, you had to pass a difficult entrance exam. Every evening, after he had finished his homework, Birju sat and went through study guides, preparing for the test. His studying seemed so important that it was as if he were carrying the fate of the entire family. Birju and I were sent to spend the summer with our father’s older sister, in Arlington, Virginia. She and our uncle lived in a small white house beside a wide road. The houses in Arlington had yards. The damp air there smelled of earth and greenery. Among the most noticeable things about Arlington was that the television networks were on different channels than in Queens. In Arlington, while I got to go out and play whenever I wanted to, Birju was not allowed to leave the house until he had studied for five hours. When we returned to Queens, his studying duties only increased. Instead of two hours every week night, he had to study three. He worked all day on weekends, stopping only when the 8 P.M. TV shows started. Many nights, I fell asleep on my mattress to the sound of his pencil scratching away at our kitchen table. Still, my mother felt that Birju was not studying hard enough. Often they fought. Once, she caught him asleep on the foam mattress in the room that my parents shared. He had claimed that he was going in there to study. Instead, she found him rolled onto his side, snoring. She began shouting and called him a liar. Birju ran past her into the kitchen and returned with a knife. Standing before her, holding the knife by the handle and pointing it at his stomach, he said, “Kill me. Go ahead, kill me. I know that’s what you want.” “Do some work instead of showing drama,” my mother said contemptuously. The day of the exam finally came. On the subway to the test, I sat and Birju stood in front of me. I held one of his test-preparation books in my lap and checked his vocabulary. Most of the words I asked him he did not know. I started to panic. Birju, I began to see, was not going to do well. As I asked my questions and our mother and father listened, my voice grew quieter and quieter. I asked Birju what “rapscallion” meant. He guessed that it was a type of onion. When I told him what it was, he looked as if he were going to cry. “Keep a calm head,” my father scolded. “Don’t worry, baby,” my mother said. “You will remember when you need to.” The exam took place in a large white cinder-block building that looked like a parking garage. As the test was going on, my parents and I walked back and forth on a sidewalk by a chain-link fence. The day was cold, gray, damp. Periodically, it drizzled. There were parked cars along the sidewalk, with waiting parents inside, and the windows of these cars grew foggy as we walked. My father said, “These tests are for white people. How are we supposed to know what ‘pew’ means?” “Don’t give me a headache,” my mother said. “I am worried enough.” “Maybe he’ll do so well in the math and science portions that it will make up for the English.” My stomach hurt. My chest was heavy. I had wanted Birju’s test day to come so that it would be over. Now that it was here, I wished that Birju had had more time. Midway through the exam, there was a break. Birju came out to the sidewalk. He looked frightened. We surrounded him. We began feeding him oranges and almonds, to cool him and to give his brain strength. “Just do your best,” my father said. “It is too late for anything else.” Birju turned around and walked back toward the building. Days went by. It was strange for Birju not to be studying. It was as if something were missing or wrong. Often Birju cried, “Mummy, I know I didn’t pass.” A warm day came when I could tie my winter coat around my waist during lunch hour, then another one, like birds out of season. In Delhi, the fountains would be turned on in the evening and crowds would gather to watch. “Hey, I’m your alcohol-fuelled recurring hallucination, not your alcohol-fuelled recurring maid.”Buy the print » Then the results arrived. Because Birju had said it so many times, I knew that an acceptance letter would come in a thick envelope, but the one Birju showed me was thin and white. Tears slid down his cheeks. “Maybe you got in,” I murmured, trying to be comforting. “Why do you think that?” Birju demanded angrily. He stared at me as if I might know something that he did not. Our mother was at work. She had said that we shouldn’t open the envelope until she arrived, that we would take it to the temple and open it there. My father arrived home after my mother. As soon as he did, Birju demanded that we go to the temple. Inside the large chamber, my mother put a dollar in the wooden box before God Shiva. Then we went to each of the idols in turn. Normally, we only pressed our hands together before each idol and bowed our heads. This time, we knelt and did a full prayer. After we had prayed before all the idols, we went back and knelt before the family of God Ram. Birju sat between our parents. “You open it, Mummy.” My mother tore off one side of the envelope. She shook out a sheet of paper. “Congratulations!” the letter began. Birju had made it! “See. I told you we should open it at the temple.” We all leaped to our feet and hugged. With her arms still around Birju, my mother looked at me over his shoulder. “Tomorrow, we start preparing you,” she said. We began to be invited to people’s houses for lunch, for dinner, for tea, so that Birju could meet these people’s children. Back then, because immigrants tended to be young, and the Indian immigration to America had only recently begun, there were very few Indian children Birju’s age, and other parents were always looking for role models. We took the subway all over Queens, the Bronx, even to Manhattan. We travelled almost every weekend, and being asked to visit made my mother very happy. “They have a girl they want you to marry,” she said once, to tease Birju. “For me,” my father said, “there is one thing only.” He rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “Dowry.” The enormous relief of Birju’s success had made my father cheerful as well. Birju began to blush. “Leave me alone,” he said. “Give me one egg at least, chicken. One egg only.” “Don’t say that,” my mother said. “We are vegetarian. Say, ‘Give me some milk, lovely goat.’ ” The triumph of getting into his school changed Birju. He sauntered. Entering a room, he appeared to be leaning back. When I spoke to him, he would look at me as if to ask how anyone could say something so foolish. One time when he looked at me this way, I blurted, “You have bad breath.” I felt foolish for having pitied him. My mother acted as if everything Birju said were smart. One afternoon, as he sat tilting back in a chair at the kitchen table, one skinny arm reaching out to touch the wall so that he did not fall, he told our mother, “You should be a toll-booth collector.” “Why?” She was standing by the stove, boiling frozen corn. “In a toll booth, people will only see your top.” My mother had been talking about trying to get a government job. She did not want to wear a uniform, though, because her hips embarrassed her. She laughed and turned to me. “Your brother is a genius,” she said. I wondered sometimes if my parents loved Birju more than they loved me. But I did not think so. They bothered him and corrected him so much more than they corrected me. We went to Arlington again in the summer. By now, after two years in America, I had grown chubby. I could grip my belly and squeeze it. Birju was tall and thin. He had a little mustache and tendrils of hair on the sides of his cheeks. Once more, I lay on my aunt’s sofa and watched TV. Once more, the TV channels were different from the ones in Queens, and they made me feel that I was living far from home. Most days, Birju went swimming at a pool in a nearby apartment building. One afternoon in August, I was stretched out on the sofa watching “Gilligan’s Island” when the telephone rang. The shades were drawn and the room was dim. My aunt answered the phone. After she hung up, she came into the doorway. “Birju has had an accident,” she said. “Get up.” She motioned with a hand for me to rise. I went reluctantly. By the time we got back from the pool, “Gilligan’s Island” would likely be over. The apartment building with the pool was tall and brown. There was a small parking lot beside the pool and an ambulance was stopped there, with a crowd of white people surrounding it. Being near so many whites made me nervous. Perhaps they would be angry at us for causing trouble. Birju should not have done whatever he had done. My aunt said, “You wait.” She had arthritis in one hip and she pushed into the crowd with a lurching peg-leg gait. I remained at the edge of the crowd and now, alone, I felt even more embarrassed. A minute passed and then two. My aunt came back, hobbling quickly. Her face looked scared. “Go home,” she said. “I have to go to the hospital.” I walked, head down, along the sidewalk. I was irritated. Birju had got into the Bronx High School of Science and now he was going to be in the hospital and our mother would feel bad for him and give him a gift. As I walked, I wondered if Birju had stepped on a nail. I wondered if he was dead. This was thrilling. If he was dead, I would get to be the only son. The sun pressed itself on me from above and also, its heat reflecting off the sidewalk, from below. I thought I should probably cry. It seemed like the right thing to do. I imagined myself alone in the house. I imagined Birju in the hospital and my aunt there. I imagined the fall, with Birju at the Bronx High School of Science and me at my ordinary school. Then the tears came. Just as I had expected, “Gilligan’s Island” was over. I lay back down on the sofa. I watched TV until five, when the news started. I picked up a book and propped it on my stomach. I read for a while, but I was aware that my aunt was gone and I was alone in the house. Something exciting was occurring. I felt as if I were missing out on an adventure. “Sometimes I wonder if we shouldn’t have built the wall higher rather than longer.”Buy the print » Around eight, my uncle arrived, in his dark pants and short-sleeved shirt, with his triangle of wispy white hair. He stood by the sink, drinking water from a glass. He still had his shoes on. For him to be wearing shoes in the kitchen was so strange that it made the kitchen feel unreal, like a display in a furniture store. “What’s happened?” I asked. He patted my head. “We don’t know.” About ten-thirty, my uncle drove us to the bus station. We were going to pick up my mother. The fact that my mother was coming made what had occurred seem very serious. I began to be scared. When my mother walked through the bus station’s automatic doors, her hair was loose, her face flattened with fear. She was wearing a yellow sari and carrying a black duffelbag. Seeing my mother, I worried that she might think I was bad for not crying. I walked up to her. She looked down, as if she didn’t recognize me. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ve cried already.” The hospital room was bright and white and noisy. There was the whirr of the machines. There were beeps. There was a loud motorized rumble, almost like that of a generator. Birju was lying on a bed with railings. The railings reminded me of a crib. There were poles on wheels all around the bed. Bags hung from the poles and there were also machines bolted to the poles. It was as if Birju were lying amid many clotheslines. He had a plastic mask over his mouth and nose. It looked like what fighter pilots wear in thin air. His eyes were wide open, as if in panic. He appeared to be staring up at some invisible thing that was pressing down on his chest. Birju had dived into the swimming pool. He had struck his head on the pool’s concrete bottom and lain there stunned for three minutes. Water had surged down his throat and into his lungs. His lungs had peeled away from the insides of his chest. My uncle carried a large cardboard box into the room that Birju and I had shared, and placed it against a wall. My aunt and my mother draped a white sheet over the box. They taped postcards of various gods on the wall, so that these appeared to be gazing at the altar. On the altar itself, they placed a spoon and, in the bowl of the spoon, a wick soaked in clarified butter. They put a wad of dough on the altar and stuck incense sticks into the dough. They did all this quickly and quietly. When they spoke, it was in a whisper. The ceiling lights were turned off. The flame in the spoon and the smoke rising from it sent shadows shaking over the walls. I lay on a strip of foam beneath one of the windows. My aunt and my mother stretched themselves face down before the altar. They sang prayers. I kept being woken by their singing. I understood that it was proper to pray in moments like this. Still, I knew that Birju was going to be all right and wouldn’t it be better for everyone to get some sleep? Around 4 A.M., the ceiling lights were turned on. I sat up. The air was thick with incense. My mother was standing before the altar, her hands pressed together. She was wearing a blue silk sari and a gold necklace, and she looked as if she were going to a wedding. A little later, when we were about to go back to the hospital, we stood in the driveway in the dark. I looked up at the stars. There were thousands of them, some of them bright, some of them dim. I suddenly had the sense that what was happening was a mistake, that we had been given somebody else’s life. In the weeks that followed, I spent most of each day sitting by Birju’s bed, chanting to him from the Ramayana. The book was a large hardcover wrapped in saffron cloth. Some of the pages had grease stains from the butter used in prayers, and I could look through the stains and see the letters on the next page. Every time I opened the book, there was a puff of incense smell from its having spent so many years near altars. I had never prayed so much before, every day, hour after hour, until my throat ached and even my tongue and my gums hurt. I had not believed in God before. Now, praying as if it were my job, I began to think that there had to be a God. People weren’t stupid. My mother wouldn’t be making me pray this way, people all over the world wouldn’t be building temples and going on pilgrimages, if there weren’t some benefit to it. It was strange that there was a God. I imagined that He was far away, busy, impatient, not especially interested in the many people who wanted His help, but obligated for some reason to hear our prayers. Time passed. I watched my mother cut Birju’s fingernails. She seemed scared to do it. “Is this all right?” she asked him. I watched her and felt as if I were dreaming. Birju had his oxygen mask removed. Many of the wheeled poles were taken away. Now he looked the way he always had, except that he seemed to be sleeping with his eyes open. A doctor told us that oxygen deprivation had destroyed his corneas and he couldn’t see. It seemed disloyal to believe this. Birju moaned, he yawned, he coughed, but his eyes were like those of a blind person, lost in thought. He responded to sounds. If there was a loud noise, he would turn his head in the direction of the noise. Then he’d roll it back and just lie there. Occasionally, he had a seizure. His teeth clamped shut and squeaked against each other. His body stiffened, his hips rose off the bed, and the bed began to rattle. Often, standing by the bed and reading to him, or holding a comic book open before him and saying, “See,” I felt such love for my brother that I wished I had known all along how much he mattered to me. I looked at him through the railings and wondered what to do.

When Isaac and I first met, at the university, we both pretended that the campus and the streets of the capital were as familiar to us as the dirt paths of the rural villages where we had grown up and lived until only a few months earlier. The capital in those days was booming with people, money, new cars, and even newer buildings, most of which had been thrown up quickly after independence, in a rush fuelled by the ecstatic promises of a socialist, Pan-African future that, almost ten years later, was still supposedly just around the corner. On the bus ride to the capital, I gave up all the names my parents had given me. I was almost twenty-five but, by other measures, much younger. I shed those names just as the bus crossed into Uganda. I was nearing Lake Victoria; I knew Kampala was somewhere close, but even then I had committed myself to thinking of it as “the capital.” The name Kampala was too small for what I imagined. That city belonged to Uganda, but the capital had no such allegiances. Like me, it belonged to no one, and anyone could claim it. I spent my first few weeks trying to imitate the gangs of boys who lingered around the university and outside the cafés and bars that bordered it. Though we couldn’t afford to take classes, we all wanted to be revolutionaries. On campus, and even in the poor quarters where Isaac and I lived, there were dozens of Lumumbas, Marleys, Malcolms, Césaires, Kenyattas, Senghors, and Selassies, boys who woke up every morning and donned the black hats and olive-green costumes of their heroes. I bought a used pair of green pants, which I wore daily, even after the knees had split open, and I let the few strands of hair on my chin grow long. I tried to think of myself as a revolutionary in the making, even though I had come to the capital with other ambitions. A decade or so earlier, there had been an important gathering of African writers and scholars at the university. I had read about it in a week-old newspaper that finally made its way to my village. That conference gave shape to my adolescent ambitions, which until then had consisted solely of leaving. I arrived in the capital poorly prepared. I had read the same few Victorian novels countless times, and I assumed that that was how English was still spoken. Until I met Isaac, I didn’t make a single friend. With my long skinny legs and narrow face, he said, I looked more like a professor than like a fighter, and in the beginning that was what he called me: Professor, or the Professor. “And what about you?” I asked him. I assumed that, like others, he had another, more public name that he wanted to be known by. He was shorter but wider than I was, his arms tightly laced with muscles and veins that ran like scars the length of his forearms. He had the build but not the face or demeanor of a soldier. He smiled and laughed too often for me to imagine he could ever hurt someone. “For now, Isaac is it,” he said. His family was from the north of Uganda, from one of the tall, darker tribes that a man in Cambridge had decided were more warrior-like than their smaller cousins to the south. His parents had died in the last round of fighting just before independence. Had the British stayed, Isaac would have done well. He had been bright enough as a child to be talked of as one of the students who could be sent abroad for schooling. But then the whole colonial experiment ended in what seemed like a long bloody afternoon, and boys like Isaac were orphaned a second time. We had both taken up residence in the eastern quarter of the city, in a hard-to-reach, hilly area prone to mud slides. Isaac was living with friends of cousins, who had agreed to let him sleep on the floor of their living room. I was renting a cot in the back of a drygoods store that on the weekends became a bar for the owner and his friends. On Friday and Saturday nights, I wasn’t allowed to come home until 2 or 3 A.M., after the bed had been used by the patrons to entertain themselves with some of the young girls in the neighborhood. With no money and nothing to do, I would circle the neighborhood, a maze of rutted, narrow paths that wound slowly up the side of a hill, at the top of which was one of the city’s newly paved roads. From here, one could look down upon our shanty village as it descended into what had once been a lush valley. I saw Isaac up there twice before we ever spoke to each other. On both occasions he was standing by the side of the road, staring at the passing traffic instead of at the city beneath him. A few days later, I saw him on campus. We were both standing near but not too close to a group of students, trying our best to belong. It was the second week of August, the start of a new semester, and there were students crowded on the central lawn, which was ringed by towering palm trees that gave the campus an air of tropical grandeur far greater than it deserved. It was with the understanding that we were both liars and frauds, poorly equipped to play the roles we had chosen, that Isaac approached me. We were in a crowd that gathered around a table where a boy with a neatly sculpted Afro was reading off a list of demands. Had Isaac and I not been there at the same time, we might have been moved by the young man’s call for better teachers, lower fees, and more freedom for the students, but all either of us could see from the moment our eyes locked was the other’s vaguely familiar, possibly hostile face staring back. Isaac waited for the speech to end. The final words were “This is our university,” followed by brief applause. Everything back then was supposed to be ours. The city, the country, Africa— they were there for the taking, and, at least in that regard, our approach to the future was no different from that of the Englishmen who preceded us. Many of the boys who were a part of that crowd would later prove the point, as they stuffed themselves with their country’s wealth. Isaac stood next to me for a few seconds before he said, “We should go somewhere and talk.” We walked until we were in a neighborhood I had never visited before. Isaac talked the entire time. He had his own version of history—half fact, half myth—which he was eager to share. He began each of his stories with “Did you know?” which was his equivalent of “Once upon a time.” “Did you know,” he said, “until a decade ago no Africans were allowed to live near the university? This is where the British were planning on building a new palace for the king. If they had lost World War Two, they were going to move all the English people here, and this part of the city was going to be just for them. They were going to make everything look like London so they wouldn’t feel so bad about losing. They were going to build a big wall around it and then change all the maps so that it looked like London was in Africa. But every time they started building the wall someone would blow it up. That’s how the war for independence started.” We stopped at a café on a street lined with single-story, tin-roofed stores selling jeans, T-shirts, and brightly patterned ankle-length dresses. We took a table outside. Isaac ordered tea for us. When it came, slightly cooler than he wanted, he sent it back and demanded another. He wanted me to be impressed by his ability to command: in this case, a warmer cup of hot water. Then he crossed his legs, leaned back in his chair, and said, “So—you go to the university, too.” “Yes,” I said. “Every day?” “Every day.” Isaac’s face softened. “My grandfather wanted me to study medicine,” he continued. “But I have plans of my own.” “Then what will you study?” “This is Africa,” he said. “There’s only one thing to study.” He waited for me to respond. After several dramatic seconds, he sighed and said, “Politics. That’s all we have here.” I hadn’t learned to speak with such authority. When Isaac asked me what I planned to study, I had to gather my courage before I could reply. “Literature,” I told him. He slapped the table with his hand. “That’s perfect,” he said. “You look like a professor. What kind of literature will you study?” “All of it,” I said, and here, for once, I spoke with a bit of confidence, because I believed in what I had said. Many of the writers who attended that conference had already begun to make themselves scarce by the time Isaac and I had that conversation: several were in exile in America; others were rumored to be dead or working for a corrupt government. But I dreamed of joining their ranks nonetheless. Buy the print » Every aspiring militant, radical, and revolutionary in Eastern and Central Africa was drawn to the university. People started coming shortly after the President took power and declared the country the first African socialist republic: “A beacon of freedom and equality where all men are brothers” was how he phrased it in the radio address he gave after staging the country’s first coup. Millions believed him. He spoke the right language—grand, pompous, and humble all at the same time. He was from the military, but he claimed he wasn’t an Army man, just a poor farmer who had picked up the gun to liberate his people, first from the British and then, after independence, from the corrupt bureaucrats who followed. It was rumored that he had a photographic memory and was a champion chess player, and that every weekend he returned to his farm to tend to his cattle and his crops. Whatever people wanted in a leader and whatever they dreamed of for themselves, they found in him. For years, the students held on to their socialist, Pan-African dream, while ignoring the corruption and violence that touched the rest of the capital. Now the dream was all but over. There were warring parties and factions split along thin ideological lines. One of the first things Isaac and I did together was to look at the students spread across the lawn in a state of constant protest and divide them into two camps: the real revolutionaries and the campus frauds. As we walked across the lawn, Isaac pointed to the various student groups and asked what I thought of this person or that. “Is that a real revolutionary?” More than half the time, he claimed I was wrong. After a dozen attempts, I asked him what made him so certain he was always right. “You know how you can tell?” he said. He took off one of his shoes and wiggled his dirty toes in the air. He held the shoe, which like my own was covered in dust and had been repaired so many times that there was hardly anything left of the sole. “Look at the shoes. Anyone who walks to campus has shoes as ruined as ours.” The next day, we lay on the grass and pointed out all the polished shoes that passed us. I no longer saw the students as a general, uniform mass. They were part of the same body but lived in different spheres. The day after, I told Isaac, “I don’t have to see the shoes. I can tell by the way they stand.” I pointed to a pack of boys on the other side of the campus and said, “Chauffeured car,” and according to him I was always right. Privilege lifted the head, focussed the eyes—facts that were already evident to Isaac. Eventually Isaac decided it was time to meet some of the boys we spent our afternoons watching. “We should introduce ourselves,” he said. As he drew close to a group of three handsomely dressed boys standing almost within earshot of us, I turned away, both embarrassed and afraid of what would happen next. When I looked up, he was already on his way back to me. “What did you say to them?” I asked him. “Nothing,” he said. “Then why are they staring at you?” “Maybe they didn’t understand my question?” “Which was?” “I asked them if they had enough room in their fathers’ cars for all of us.” That was the start of Isaac’s revolution, although neither of us knew it at the time. He posed variations of the same question to selected groups of boys for a week. He called it his “interrogation.” He would say to me, “I’m going to interrogate those boys over there.” Or, “Who should I interrogate today?” and before I could respond he was off. The interrogations ended once enough students knew what to expect when they saw Isaac coming for them. “I’ve learned something important,” he said, after he declared an end to his questioning. “All the rich boys are named Alex. If they tell you something different, don’t believe them.” That afternoon, he began to wave at the most obviously affluent students while calling out, “Hello, Alex. Very nice to see you again.” Or, “Alex, where have you been? Say hello to your friend Alex for me.” The only real students we admired were the ones who, like us, failed to hide the not so subtle marks of poverty. I admired them because they had a place in the university, Isaac for other reasons. When I wasn’t with him, I made a careful study of how they held their heads, if they looked down before speaking, and, most important, how they spoke. The star of the campus for Isaac—and for many others, too—was virtually invisible. He was said to be tall, young, handsome, and well read and, unlike the rich boys in blue shirts and khakis, to wear only olive-green pants and shirts. Isaac claimed to have seen him from afar as he was leaving the campus. He said he was either Congolese or Rwandan. “He’s tall and serious like a Rwandan,” he said, “but it’s the Congolese who know how to fight. Maybe he’s both.” “Maybe he doesn’t exist,” I said. “Maybe he lives only in the black man’s head.” There was an article in the campus newspaper with the outline of a head and a series of quotes from students who claimed he was a myth. The next week, slogans written in black marker began to appear around campus. Their message, which every student soon knew by heart, was simple: Marx was a great man, and now he’s dead. Lenin was a great man, and now he’s dead. I have to admit, I’m not feeling so well myself. Isaac loved that. “That man is something special,” he said, over and over. He said it was proof that there were still real revolutionaries around, “not just rich boys waiting to be government ministers.” The day after that message appeared, we scoured the campus in search of others. We found six more that day, five the next. On the third day, they had all been painted over and replaced with handwritten posters that read, “It Is a Crime Against the Country to Deface Our University Walls.” The following Monday, Isaac arrived on campus with a dozen flyers he had made, using stolen paper and markers. That day, we christened the start of our paper revolution. “Our first act of war,” Isaac said, “is to hang these up where everyone can see them. Why should they be the only ones who get to say stupid things?” The flyers contained a new list of crimes against the country: It is a Crime Against the Country to fail to report any Crimes committed Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country not to know what is a Crime Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country to ask what is a Crime Against the Country. It is a Crime Against the Country to think or say there are too many Crimes Against the Country. “We need one more,” I said. Isaac handed me his marker. I wrote the fifth and final crime on each of the flyers before showing it to him: It is a Crime Against the Country to read this. He put his arm around my shoulder and kissed the top of my head. “Together,” he said, “we’re remarkable.” We waited for midday, when the university all but shut down for the hottest part of the afternoon, and then posted the flyers at the entrances to the main buildings on campus. Isaac added to the bottom of each one after we had taped it to a door, “The Paper Revolution Has Begun.” When the late-afternoon classes started, we stood outside every building in turn, Isaac right next to the doors, me a few feet away. It was better than we had hoped. A crowd of students hovered around each flyer. At one point, someone tried to take one of them down, but he was quickly pushed to the back of the crowd. Isaac wanted to celebrate the paper revolution’s first victory. “Very soon, the whole campus will know who we are,” he said. He took the flyers as proof that we were getting somewhere, that we were more than just idle spectators of campus life. Isaac suggested I choose a poet’s name. “You’re no longer just the Professor,” he said. “It’s time you moved on to something new. Choose someone famous, but not too famous.” I chose Langston. “He’s a poet?” he asked me. “Yes,” I told him. “A great one,” although I had never read anything by him, and wasn’t even certain that he was a poet. I knew that he had attended the writers’ conference, and that I instantly felt attached to his name. To celebrate our rise, Isaac suggested we go to the Café Flamingo, which was the most popular of all the cafés that sat along the winding, tree-lined road leading to campus. The students who spent time in the cafés had a reputation for ordering lavishly. They commanded pastries, tea, and coffee like mini-sovereigns and then later fought over who would pay. Normally, Isaac and I would have been embarrassed to sit in one of those cafés for hours, ordering only a cup of tea, but Isaac was feeling victorious, and there was nothing that could shame him. “That’s where we belong,” he said. “In one of those expensive cafés with the rest of the students. Years from now, they will say, ‘That is where Isaac and Langston the Poet Professor used to meet.’ ” He chose a table outside, near a group of boys who had their wide, butterfly-collared shirts exposed to reveal the gold chains underneath. Two spoke with genuine English accents, different in register from the fraudulent ones often heard around the campus. All of them wore freshly polished shoes. Whether any of them noticed Isaac and me take our seats is hard to say. Had we walked off, no one would have thought of us, but Isaac didn’t want it to be that way, and so it wasn’t. “This place is full of Alexes,” I said. “I know,” he said. “That’s why we came here.” “It always takes me a couple of cups of coffee to feel the rapture.”Buy the print » Isaac clapped his hands to get the waitress’s attention. The boys stopped their discussion and turned toward us. They started laughing. They immediately saw us for the poor village boys that we really were. A boy in a blue-and-white shirt was the first to stand up and clap back in response. The rest followed: some stood, a few sat, but all of them were clapping and mocking us. Poor Isaac. He was outsized and outnumbered, but I didn’t know him well enough to understand that made no difference to him. “Don’t get up,” he said. “I know how to handle this.” And so I sat while he made his way toward them. It was a slower, more tempered version of his usual lope. He paused mid-stride, bent down, and briefly grazed the ground with his right hand. He took two more long strides, during which he aimed, pulled back his arm, and released the rock he had picked up directly into the mouth of the boy in the blue-and-white shirt. The applause stopped in time for us to hear the boy’s jawbone crack. Isaac was taken down quickly. He held his ground as three boys about the same size as him charged. I kept my eyes focussed long enough to know that he made no attempt to run, and then I stopped looking. He was punched and kicked for several minutes. The beating would have lasted much longer had the boys not been ordered to stop by an older man who had been sitting near them. When I turned back, he had his arms around the shoulders of two of them and was walking them out of the café. Isaac was still conscious, bleeding from his mouth and nose. His face and arms seemed to be swelling as I knelt beside him. “What should I do?” I asked him. He tried to laugh, but his lips and his lungs refused. “This is nothing,” he said. “Go home and pretend this never happened.” Two weeks passed before I saw Isaac again. I searched for him on campus and in our neighborhood, afraid of what he would say if I found him, or what he would think of me if I didn’t try. Then, one day, he walked through the front gates of the university with dark bruises beneath both eyes, a gash across his pointed chin, and a patch of scabs across the right side of his face. He limped, but with force—as if he were trying to show that the damage wasn’t permanent—to our corner of the campus. I watched as every head turned toward him. I knew the injuries were genuine, but still I thought, You’re doing a wonderful job, Isaac. By the time he reached me, there were pockets of students all across the main lawn whispering about him. Had I not been so uncertain as to where I stood with him, I would have made more of his return. I would have told him that it was good to see him again, that he had been missed. “So—you’re finally back,” I said instead. I couldn’t decide if I should hold out my hand. “Yes,” he said. “I knew this place would be empty without me.” And we left it there. I followed Isaac toward the center of the campus. When we reached the southwest corner of the lawn, a spot normally occupied by the only two Angolans on campus, we stopped. Isaac didn’t acknowledge it, but it was obvious he was feeling tired. “We should sit,” he said. “There’s a bench over there.” I pointed to a shade-covered spot. “Too far,” he said, and it was then that I caught the distinct wheezing in his breath. He had carried his limp far enough. He leaned gently on a young tree that bent slightly under his weight. He eased his way onto the ground and pulled his knees up close to his chest. Every person who passed us stared at Isaac. There were brutally broken bodies begging on street corners across the city, and most of us hardly noticed them. People stared at Isaac because they assumed he was a student at the university, and therefore they thought they knew how he had earned his injuries. Several days earlier, a large crowd of protesters had marched along one of the main boulevards leading to the State House. They were allowed to get within a hundred yards before the tear gas and the clubs came out. A young woman walked past us and, without breaking her stride, said, “Our country needs more boys like you.” “You’ve become very popular,” I said, “and you haven’t even been around.” “I know,” Isaac said. “It’s a shame. I should have had myself beaten earlier. I could have been President by now.” I didn’t judge him for letting that misconception spread, but only because I believed the timing of his return was a coincidence. The weeks after that were calm around the university, despite the almost daily protests in the parts of the capital farthest from campus. There were rumors about arrests and violence on the edges of the city, and a few sparely written stories in the English-language newspapers, which I read and then immediately forgot, as if they were dispatches from a foreign country. It was understood that Isaac could always be found in the same spot, even if no one had yet tried to seek him out. Each day at dusk we made our way slowly home. Isaac was still limping, although less noticeably. Walking required his concentration, but I suspected that he had to remember to struggle. If he was lying about his injury, I was hardly ready to hold him accountable. His wounds had got him somewhere. He was a figure, even if one without a name, and I understood his desire to hold on to that until another step on the university’s social ladder had been mounted. Only then would he give up the limp and the bandages; fortunately, he would still have the scars. I imagined him, as an old man, pointing to an old wound on his hand or his face, and saying, “This one came from the police.” Or, “This one I can’t remember anymore. I have so many on my body.” It wasn’t long before students began to join Isaac and me by our tree in the center of campus. They had heard only rumors about him and knew nothing about me, but our daily vigil on the grass had made us familiar, comforting figures to gather around. The sole marker we had to distinguish us was a sign that Isaac posted on the tree behind us every day: “What Crimes Against the Country have you committed today?” The first students who came to Isaac were cousins. Their names were Patience and Hope, and they were dressed in matching pleated gray skirts that were cut almost an inch above the knee. “Sit,” Isaac told them, and then he gestured toward me. “This is my friend Langston the Professor, the future Emperor of Ethiopia.” Then he said, “Now tell me, what crimes against our country have you committed today?” Patience, whose mouth bristled with clean, hard, white teeth, spoke first. “Does sitting here count as a crime?” she asked. Isaac smiled. “Yes,” he said, “it definitely does.” He turned to Hope, who was leaning against her cousin. “And you,” he said. “If you’re related, then that makes you guilty as well.” They laughed. They had come to be amused, and Isaac had charmed them. He didn’t try for more than that. After they had played their role, he asked where they were from and what they were studying. Both were majoring in economics; they were born and raised in the capital. “Economics,” Isaac said. “That’s very good.” But I knew that, like me, he had only a vague understanding of what that meant: money, who had it and who didn’t. As Patience and Hope walked away, Isaac told them not to forget to say goodbye to the future emperor. Only Patience acknowledged me. “Goodbye, Emperor,” she said. By the time I thought to respond, she was too far away to hear me. Isaac watched me follow her with my eyes. “Don’t worry,” he said. “She’ll be back.” Every day more students came and introduced themselves to Isaac. One boy confessed to stealing money from his father, to which Isaac responded, “Stealing is not a crime in this country. Not stealing, however, is a terrible thing.” All the boys and girls close enough to hear that made sure everyone saw them laugh. When they were gone, Isaac whispered to me, “Did you see who laughed the hardest?” I hadn’t, and I doubted that he had, either, but I knew the answer. “The boys with the polished shoes,” I said. “That’s right. It was Alex.” If students didn’t know what to say, he adjusted the rules of his game. He helped them invent their crimes. He borrowed from the President’s daily radio broadcasts, which for months had been long, rambling diatribes against all the enemies of the country, from the Europeans and the Americans to the Africans who were secretly working with them. “Have you ever been an imperialist?” he asked them. “Have you ever tried to colonize a country?” “Do you listen to British radio?” “Do you know who the Queen of England is?” “Have you ever been friends with a European?” “Have you ever wanted to go to America?” In just a few weeks, Isaac’s confessional drew hundreds of students, and, of those, a few dozen returned consistently. Most of us didn’t know one another’s names or ages or reasons for being there, and that was fine, because silence isn’t the same when it’s shared. Its sad and lonely aspects are shunted off. “May I suggest a wine and a filter setting?”Buy the print » The protests that had begun at the start of the semester turned violent at around this time. Returning home one evening, we heard how, in a shanty village that neither of us had ever been to, tires had been thrown over the heads of four soldiers who had come to arrest someone. After a few minutes of watching the soldiers struggle to free themselves, someone doused the tires with gasoline and set them ablaze. The next day, the neighborhood was cordoned off, and for twenty-four hours no one who lived there was allowed to leave. A few days later, several people were shot near the State House gates—they were accused of plotting to kill the President. Then the dead people’s families and friends were arrested. And so, even though our neighborhood was quiet, everyone who lived around us felt vulnerable. If tomorrow it was decided that your neighbor was trying to undermine the government, then the only thing you could say was “Yes, I had suspected that might be possible all along.” Up on the hill where the university sat, little had changed. Isaac took down his sign in March. “I think it’s gone on long enough,” he said. He had earned the respect of the revolutionaries on both sides of us. Students waved or said hello as they passed. When he took down the sign, I asked if he knew what he was going to do next. “I do.” He leaned against his tree and crossed his legs as if preparing to nap. “I’m going to enjoy this for as long as it lasts.” The hours we spent on campus followed us home at the end of the day. For weeks we were like visitors in our real lives, and even then we were terrible tourists, purposefully blind to the plainclothesmen who watched all the houses with notebooks in their hands, deaf to the evening shouts around us. I knew it wouldn’t last long. My landlord came to my room one evening and told me to pay attention at night, especially when I was supposed to be sleeping. “Rest in the day,” he said. “Keep your eyes open at night. I tell this to everyone.” But I knew it was me he was worried about. I was a foreigner. I had no ties to any of the local or even distant tribes. I played on the grass in the afternoon with Isaac, and then worried late at night. As it turned out, it was Isaac who was cast out into the street first. Not long after the soldiers were burned, the friends of his cousins whom he had been living with told him they could no longer afford to keep him there. “They told me they don’t have enough space for another person,” he said. That was on the first night of his homelessness, when he came and knocked on my wall sometime after midnight, looking for a place to sleep. Isaac made a bed on the floor out of the clothes he had brought with him. One of us often fell asleep for a half-hour or less while on campus. Whoever was awake sat guard; most often, I was the one who slept. Those brief naps had become the best sleep I got, because I knew Isaac was next to me and wouldn’t leave until I awoke. Now I turned onto my side so I could see his outline on the floor. “I know you’re tired,” he said. “Don’t worry. Nothing is going to happen. Get some sleep.” I tried to sound as confident as he did. “I’m not worried,” I said, but it was obvious I was scared and had been for many days. “You’re an emperor,” he told me. “King of kings. No harm can come to you.” I listened to him breathe. I counted his breaths. I doubt I made it to a hundred before I was asleep. I didn’t wake up until late the next morning, and by then he was gone. A notice was published in all the newspapers that morning, warning people not to gather in large numbers. It took the top spot on every front page, under headlines such as “GOVERNMENT WARNS OF INCREASING RISKS IN PUBLIC GATHERINGS.” Had the article simply stated what its authors knew to be true, something along the lines of “MASS ARRESTS AND TORTURE HAVE BEEN PLANNED” or just “LEAVE NOW,” a lot of time and lives could have been saved. Instead, there were several days of random beatings and arrests of young men across the capital before a mass retreat indoors began. When I saw Isaac on campus again a few days later, I asked him where he was living. He told me that he was staying with someone far away from our neighborhood and that I shouldn’t worry. “I have friends who have given me a place,” he said. I went to campus daily, to see him but also simply to breathe easier, to walk, sit, and read without fear. I knew that this wouldn’t hold for much longer; the noose that had been cast over the city would find its way up the hill, regardless of how many government ministers’ children were at the university. I’m sure Isaac knew this, too, and so did the other students, who, in the days following the headlines, began to gather around him in increasing numbers. The police who patrolled the campus had taken note of the crowd and began to linger around the edge of our group. Someone from inside our circle said, for all, including the guards, to hear, “There is nothing more restless than anxious men in power.” Our gathering was broken up on a Friday afternoon at the start of April, after classes had ended. Our numbers were no larger than they had been the week before: we were twenty or thirty at most. The only difference was that we huddled closer together. When four campus guards in shabby blue uniforms, wielding worn wooden nightsticks, surrounded us, more than a minute passed before any of us thought to run. The closer we were to one another the safer we felt, and each of us was reluctant to give that up. The guards waited until they were certain they had our attention before they began to swing. The only person who didn’t run was Isaac. When I looked for him, he was just standing there, his arms at his sides so that his entire body was fully exposed. A few minutes passed before one of the guards noticed him. He was the perfect image of defiance. They’re going to bash his head in, I thought. Seconds later came the crack of wood meeting bone. The guards left Isaac where he fell. I ran and hid in a parking lot on the eastern edge of the campus. When I came back, ten minutes later, he was gone. I walked to the tree where I had last seen him and searched the grass for any sign that he had been there—an impression of a body in the grass, a few flecks of blood—but there was nothing. I waited for an hour, and then two, knowing he wouldn’t return, but hoping that he might see me and know that this time I hadn’t abandoned him. I waited each night for Isaac to knock on my window. I would have taken him in without hesitation, but I was afraid he would ask. New checkpoints were erected daily, and within days it was impossible to penetrate the cluster of shacks that ringed our neighborhood and the two surrounding it without showing your official I.D. Every coming and going, except those through obscure back routes that wound through half-burnt piles of trash and open latrine pits, eventually had a checkpoint where young men logged into notebooks the names and occupations of everyone who passed. No bureaucracy in the country had ever worked properly until then. Years could be lost in search of a birth certificate, a driver’s license, or a passport. The daily records of names, entries, and departures signalled the end of that. I assumed Isaac had chosen to keep his distance. I imagined that, after recovering on a bed in a stranger’s apartment, he had walked to our neighborhood and taken note of the checkpoints and the fatigues of the Presidential Guard. Then he would have turned his head in the other direction, to hide the bruises that covered his face, and walked farther and farther north, past the last of the slums, until he reached a corner of the city that was barely inhabited and that until only a few years earlier had been a village of a dozen thatch-roofed huts. I didn’t have the heart or the courage to imagine him in prison, much less dead; I thought of him simply as lost, one of the millions across the world who vanish one day and can still rise again. When I returned to campus, after a week, it was obvious that the days of banners, posters, and speeches were over. I knew, as soon as I passed through the metal gates of the university and saw at least a hundred students sitting shoulder to shoulder, back to back, in a circle, on the same grounds where Isaac and I had often sat with only each other for company, that the only thing left of the campus I had known was the buildings. The students had conquered that piece of land, and their mass was proof of the lengths to which they were willing to go to defend it. Something was smoldering along the edges of the circle, but from my angle it was impossible to tell what had been burned; there were too many soldiers and police for me to take in the entire scene. The best thing for me was to turn around and leave through the front gates. This was not my fight and not why I had come here, but that was irrelevant now. I was no longer just a spectator. Isaac had insured that. I couldn’t see him yet, but I was certain he was at the center of that crowd, ready for battle, waiting for me to join him.

“Lovey,” her husband said gently, which was his way. “It’s for you.” The velvet blackness of 2 A.M., of nearly death-deep sleep: the ringing telephone had been a fire alarm in her dream; reluctantly, she’d exited an unfamiliar building but not awakened, hovering in some liminal space. The building was filled with naked bodies, and she wished to return to them and their naughty party. “Lovey,” her husband said again, and she was livid with him, with his dull insistence, forcing her to attend to him when what she wanted to do was run back inside the burning building. “Lovey,” he said a third time, and then the light snapped on. On the phone was Bernadette, her former stepdaughter. Her ex-husband’s youngest and most difficult girl, who was busy apologizing, as usual. “I’m so sorry, but he’s been drinking,” Bernadette was saying of her delinquent husband. “I need to find him before something happens. I mean, he can’t afford to get arrested again.” “I can be there in twenty minutes.” “Actually? I’m sorry, but could I bring the kids to you? If he comes home, I don’t want them to see him. You know, it’s just so hard to have a conversation with kids around. Or a fight, for that matter, which is probably what’s going to happen. God, I’m really so fucking sorry, Lovey. . . .” “Bring them, please, it’s fine—you should never worry about that.” Sleep and dreams had fallen away, along with, she suddenly realized, her first husband, whose hand she’d been holding in the burning building. Had he been nude, too? That wouldn’t have been like him, naked in public. “I’m already in the car with them,” Bernadette said. “I was thinking I could start on Central and just see if he’s parked on some barstool or other. Please don’t tell Dad, O.K.? I mean, he already thinks I’m a total fuckup and he hates Aaron enough. Plus, he’ll tell my sisters.” And then she was crying. Poor Bernadette. Had the girl ever not been miserable? Even as a child, she had cultivated hurtful friendships, had forever been suffering slights or neglect or flat-out cruelty, this girl like a loyal beaten dog. “Honey, I would never tell your dad. We’re not exactly on speaking terms. Bring the kids. I’m up. Don’t worry.” “Actually?” Bernadette said. “I’m in your driveway. God, Lovey, I’m really, really sorry!” The seven-year-old carried the diaper bag and a backpack, tilted sideways under the load, while his mother brought in the two car seats holding his sleeping sisters. “God, it smells like snow out there! How often does that happen at this time of year? I pumped,” Bernadette explained in a whisper. “Give Lovey the breast milk,” she told Caleb. The boy produced a pair of tepid yellowish Baggies. There was always something a little unsavory about dealing with breast milk. Maybe if Lovey had had her own babies she wouldn’t have felt this way. The girls were left in their car seats on the living-room rug, which seemed wrong, somehow, people lashed into chairs, especially the three-year-old, whose big head looked unnaturally perpendicular in a way that would lead to a terrible neck ache. On the other hand, the girls were sure to scream if wakened. Bernadette was squinting at her cell phone, lips moving as she read something there. “Shit, he’s with Lance—that can’t end well. So I think she’ll be good till maybe, like, four?” She pressed her hand into each breast, checking. “You could just nuke a bottle for her then. And Caleb—I don’t think he’ll sleep, but he could watch Looney Tunes, maybe? With no sound? Will you watch Looney Tunes on mute so Lovey can go back to bed, honey?” “Don’t worry about us,” Lovey said. “We’ll play Monotony.” Lovey was the only person who would indulge Caleb’s fondness for Monopoly. The boy had been her first grandchild, born the year she divorced his grandfather, when she was a mere thirty-seven—far too young to be called Grandma! In public she was often mistaken for his mother, and it was for Caleb that she’d come up with an acceptable nickname, Lovey, to take the place of Evelyn. He was a serious boy, a boy who hadn’t spoken until he could do so in complete sentences, who’d said, quite frankly, after the birth of each of his sisters, that he did not like them. “How’s your new sister?” somebody would ask. “Terrible,” he’d reply. His feelings were so readily hurt. He was like his mother that way, a child too tender, who bruised. Nor did he laugh easily. “Please don’t think I’m a fuckup,” Bernadette pleaded as she whirled her way toward the door. “And tell William I’m sorry I woke him. Be good, Caleb. I love you.” Caleb was already laying out the game board, counting money, and stacking up the Chance cards. He looked like his grandfather, Lovey’s first husband—the same thick copper-colored hair, the large brown eyes and plush lips. Her first husband had been forty-five, at the tail end of his fruitful handsomeness, when she married him but still moving through the world with the confidence of a man who’d bedded a lot of women, all but the first few—when he was a beginner, on the receiving end of a romantic education—younger than him; he was a serial seducer. Lovey had been his third wife; perhaps she could have predicted that she would not succeed where two others had failed, but that was the nature of love, and of youth, and the combination, youthful love—they made you arrogant, or stubborn, impervious to the lessons of others. If you paid attention to all the lessons of others, you might never do anything. Caleb handed Lovey the dog. He was always the hat. “I want to be the banker,” he said. “Fine,” she said, though this would make it more difficult for her to guarantee that he won. But that was the challenge in raising children, wasn’t it? Insuring that your ability to deceive kept pace with their ability to see through you. At what point were you able to come completely clean? Could you ever, for example, reveal to children that parents did not, actually, love their offspring equally? Her ex-husband had preferred his eldest, the prettiest, the strongest. And Lovey? She’d always been partial to needy Bernadette. Bernadette’s sisters had found their stepmother lacking. She was so young. For a while, it had been fun to play the hip young mother, the one who shared clothing with them, who liked their music, the four of them ganging up on her husband, their father, who was old, so old! So old-fashioned! So out of date! So shockable! But he wasn’t, not really, and at some point his indulgence began to falter, his paternal tolerance turned tense, at least as it regarded Lovey, because eventually she was no longer his pretty young wife; she was, instead, too familiar, too known and knowing, too something he could not even put his finger on, but he no longer wished to have sex with her, no longer found her desirable enough to be able to have sex with her. This wasn’t willed, he assured her; it wasn’t his fault. If she insisted, he could medicate himself into readiness, but did she really want that? Did she, he asked earnestly, want him to fake what he could not naturally feel? Was that the kind of love she wanted? Yes, she confessed, though only to herself. Yes, that was what she would take, if it was all he could offer. “You told me to be honest,” he said. “This is me being honest.” The first stage of the game was always the best—all that acquisition and possibility, the tidy array of money, the fairness. Caleb knelt in his chair, poised over the colorful board like a gargoyle, rolling for Lovey when she went to check on his sisters, moving her Scottie dog forward, providing her with two hundred dollars whenever Go came around. In order not to land on Boardwalk first, Lovey allowed one of the dice to fall to the floor, claiming a number that put her on Luxury Tax, whatever that was, instead. At last, Caleb acquired his beloved cobalt-blue plot. Later, once it was expensively developed, Lovey would land there an inordinate number of times so that he could fleece her. Why was it so satisfying to see him win? It was nice, this strange intimacy in the kitchen at three in the morning, no other light in the house. They were outside of time, Lovey thought, waiting for the rules to kick in again. If it did snow, school might be closed. Albuquerque was not accustomed to weather; Lovey had grown up in the Midwest, where snow days required an actual blizzard, instead of mere flurries or patches of ice. Her first husband had brought her to the desert; she could thank him, she supposed, for that gift. When they parted, he hadn’t wanted much of what they’d collected together, in their twelve years. Was that generosity? Guilt? Or simple indifference? Caleb heard the baby first, his head tipped toward the living room as his hand halted above the board in mid-count. “Forty-five seconds,” he told Lovey, meaning the breast milk and the microwave. “I can do it.” Lovey took the opportunity while the boy was at the refrigerator to slip a five-hundred-dollar bill from her stack of cash back into the bank. She could not figure out the car seat’s elaborate buckle, so the child’s crying became hysterical. Caleb silently undid the clasp, then found the three-year-old’s pacifier and stoppered her with it before she fully woke as well. “You’re a good boy,” Lovey told him repeatedly. In the kitchen, the warm bottle waited. Lovey had only to sit down and assume the position, the girl’s face beside her own breast. While she fed the baby, Caleb played both sides of the game, counting aloud, asking if Lovey wanted to buy the electric company or not. “Not,” she said. Her pickiness about property he never questioned. He seemed to accept the idea that he alone knew that buying everything was the secret to success. Caleb’s sisters were utterly unlike their brother. They demanded what they wanted. They entered a room and immediately began competing to be its center of attention, the baby now knocking her head into Lovey’s sternum, making fists with her hands and banging at her bottle; if her nails weren’t clipped, she’d rake her own face until it bled. They required a lot of attention. They made a great deal of noise. The three-year-old could not be reasoned with; it was useless to try. She did not understand taking turns or sharing, and resorted to crude short-cutting substitutions like grabbing and screaming. “If they were dogs,” Caleb had told Lovey of his sisters, “you could put them in a cage.” “If they were dogs,” Lovey said, “you could take them to the pound.” When the baby began gagging, Caleb informed Lovey that the bottle was to blame, that the milk came out faster than it did from his mother’s breast, that the baby was used to sucking harder, so she choked herself. “Greedy girl,” Lovey murmured. “I wonder where your daddy is.” “I don’t know,” Caleb said. “But he rode his bike and he forgot his helmet.” “Dangerous.” Although safer, by far, than driving. Aaron’s sobriety was tenuous, court-ordered, the elephant in the room at any family get-together. He would sit meekly at the table studying his sparkling water while others pretended not to be aware of his every sip. Months would pass—a new child would be born, a better job would come along, things would be looking up—and then the phone call in the middle of the night. Bernadette had always loved boys like this, bad boys, attractive and uncontrollable. Her first boyfriend had drowned in a lake after driving a car into it. Some other night, and Bernadette could have been in that car with him. Aaron had probably been friends with that boy—it would make sense. Bernadette hadn’t really had a chance to get much past high school. She’d got pregnant with Caleb in her first semester at the U. The child had been responsible for her cleaning up her act and completing that year, her only college experience. In fact, Caleb’s arrival had given everyone some distraction. His grandfather had gone—left not only Lovey but his daughters, moved a thousand miles north, and started anew—but in his place was this beautiful, easy child. “It tastes and smells just like a glass of wine!”Buy the print » Without Aaron, there would be no Caleb. Lovey had to remind herself of this sad fact. Her ex-stepson-in-law caused a lot of trouble, but, because of him, here before her was a boy for her to love, who loved her. Caleb would grow up and perhaps grow away from her—there was no shared blood, and someday he would understand that. Someday he might untie the knots of those prefixes that labelled Lovey, ex- and step-. He would turn into a teen-ager and disappear, like his father, into the night. Lovey had lived through those adolescent years with her first husband’s three daughters, each girl more outrageous than the one before, culminating with the spectacular misbehavior of Bernadette, who’d had, it seemed, no kernel of self-control or restraint at her center, who’d run away, totalled vehicles, got arrested, inhaled or smoked or drunk whatever substance anyone handed her, landed in jail, who had perhaps been unable to find a way to make herself want to continue living. Until Caleb. The boy had saved her as well. The baby was still fussy after her bottle, agitated and thrashing. She didn’t want a pacifier. She didn’t want to be left kicking on the floor under the spell of a musical mobile. She didn’t need a new diaper, couldn’t be made contented. It was as if she wished to break out of her own skin. Lovey sat her on her lap and the child grabbed up the game tokens, stuffing one into her mouth before either Caleb or Lovey could stop her. “If she swallows it, we have to wait for it to come out in her poop,” Caleb said. “Which is gross.” “Jesus Christ!” Lovey hooked her index finger into the child’s mouth, removing the little metal dog. “Maybe she’s still hungry,” she said over the girl’s renewed outrage. The noise woke the three-year-old, who began wailing from the living room, “Ma-ma-ma-ma-ma-ma!” Her brother went to fetch her, having first pushed the game to the center of the table, out of reach. Lovey put several of her peach and blue hundred- and fifty-dollar bills back in the bank. She also removed a few houses from the long crowded row of red and yellow properties, where she’d become an inadvertent real-estate mogul. In came sad Celia, not as lovely as her older brother or her little sister, the child who’d lost in the looks lottery, big-featured and big-boned. She also seemed developmentally behind—still wearing diapers, still chewing on a pacifier, still sobbing inarticulately. It felt bad to dislike her, and Lovey would never have admitted to it, but the child irritated her. She sat now on the kitchen floor and continued to wail for her mother. Over and over, the plea, a pitiful mass of green mucus beneath her nose and chin. Lovey had closed the kitchen door to keep William from waking. He had hospital rounds in the morning, in a mere four hours; he needed his sleep. These children did not compel his specific interest, coming into his life, as they had, two or three times removed, these ex-step-in-laws-by-marriage. He had his own children to fret over; their hardships were another whole scenario, ongoing across town, in his former house, with his ex-wife and her new husband. Lovey got out the candy, the surefire solution, a small pile of M&M’s for Celia to take solace in. “Is there enough for me?” Caleb asked. “Not really,” Lovey said. “Just the one snack bag. I have raisins.” “No, thanks.” He sighed. Raisins: that was his lot in life. Even after her second bottle, the baby was not satisfied. Bernadette had predicted 4 A.M., and here it was. Lovey texted her and got no reply. “There’s formula in the bag,” Caleb told her, and then proceeded to fix a bottle of it, studying the lines on the bottle, levelling the powder with a knife on the scoop. It made Lovey sad to see him shake up the concoction before microwaving it, and sadder still to watch him test its temperature on his wrist. A text arrived from Bernadette: “Found him, heading home!” “Everybody fine here,” Lovey wrote back. The beauty of texting: no telltale soundtrack. For the kitchen was loud, both girls miserable, the chocolate gone, the formula apparently not to the baby’s taste. She wanted the real thing, from the real source. “Hey there,” William said, announcing himself, hair mashed flat against his temple, shirtless and in gym shorts. Seeing him like this always reminded Lovey that her first husband would never have walked around without a shirt, without his hair combed; he was vain about his body, his age, his aging body. Again, she tried to recall: had he been nude in her dream? He had often taken an apple to bed with him at night, so that he could freshen his breath with a bite first thing in the morning. William gave Lovey a perfunctory stale-smelling peck on the cheek. “What’s all the hubbub, bub?” he asked the three-year-old as he stepped over her to get to the coffeemaker. The child swung her arm out to hit his shin. “I’m sorry,” Lovey said. “Mercy,” William said. “That kid packs a wallop. And you appear to be getting your ass kicked,” he said, regarding the game. “I’ve arrived here not a moment too soon.” Lovey’s first husband had been known to storm out of dinner parties, to take offense at nothing, to cut off friendships—“Dead to me!” he would declare. He’d behaved like a child always on the verge of a tantrum. With him, Lovey had had to be careful, to tread lightly, to pay her full attention. All of her friends preferred William. They approved of his jocularity, his slow-moving, steady ways. He’d been an E.R. doc; it had given him perspective. In this dawn kitchen, there was, to his practiced eyes, no real trouble. “Give me that,” William said, taking the baby from Lovey. “Let’s try some shock therapy, shall we?” He opened the back door and stepped out into the cold air, which silenced the baby instantaneously. When he brought her back inside and she began to wail again, he did the same thing. Caleb said, “Maybe you should leave her out there?” “It’d be tempting if there weren’t snow. And then there’s that one,” William said, “sitting in her own filth.” This made Caleb laugh, a bright burst of surprised happiness. He would repeat this expression for days, amusing himself with its perfectly droll un-profaneness. William took over the Monopoly game while Lovey attended to diapers. “What is that pile of cash doing there?” he asked, of the Free Parking money. It wasn’t in the rules, but it was tradition. William’s children were teen-age boys who played high-school football. That was the sort of father he’d been, one who enjoyed a team and rules. If Caleb had been his son, he’d have had a bristly haircut and would never have been allowed to stay up all night playing Monopoly. If he’d had to play a board game, it would have been something dignified, like chess. By the time Lovey got back with the freshly clothed girls, Caleb’s lip was trembling, something William wouldn’t necessarily notice, since he was playing along just to be a good sport, a place-holder. The Free Parking money was gone, she noted. Lovey let Celia knock the whole enterprise to the floor, a glorious clattering spill of cards and tokens and fluttering cash. “An act of God,” William declared. He stretched and scratched, finished his coffee, gave Lovey a knowing lift of his brow and Caleb a ruffling of his hair, then disappeared into the shower. By the time he returned, the game was under way again and Lovey was nearly destitute. “You’re hopeless, honey,” William said, settling at his computer for the news. “Hey, look,” he said, swinging the screen around for Lovey to see. For a few seconds, Lovey studied the Facebook photograph: Bernadette in a short dress, holding a cigarette and a beer bottle, Aaron to her right, another man to her left, the two of them equally in possession of her in a flagrantly drugged and drunken state. “Freak blizzard in Duke City!” the caption read, the time imprint only thirty minutes earlier. As a teen-ager, Bernadette had come to Lovey on many an occasion, wasted and weeping, repentant and apologetic, afraid of her mercurial father, claiming again and again that only Lovey understood her. That same girl was in the photograph, her loose sedated face, flanked by the same idle boys, whose reckless seduction she could not resist. And then suddenly the photograph was gone. As if it had been a product of Lovey’s imagination, something she had dreamed. “She took it down,” William said. “Of course. She realized you’d see it—of course she took it down.” “What?” Caleb asked, monitoring what was happening. “Let’s check with your mom about school,” Lovey said. “Maybe you can take the day off.” “I don’t want to miss school.” “Maybe it’ll be a snow day.” When Bernadette answered, Lovey understood immediately that she was still drunk. “Lovey,” she said. “I’m sorry. The good news is I found him, he’s fine, but the bad news is we have to talk—it’s time to come to Jesus, again.” Lovey’s first husband had stolen her best years, keeping her captive during the time that she might, in some other circumstance, have delivered children of her own. He’d fooled her, she thought. He’d held her hostage and then released her when it was too late. That was the story she told herself and mostly believed. And Bernadette alone of the three girls subscribed to it as well. The others had split their loyalty equally, judging nobody, visiting their father, accepting their second stepmother, who was the same age as they. Only impulsive Bernadette had severed ties. Only loyal Bernadette had stood by Lovey. “Let her sober up before you take the kids home,” William advised. “Let them both sober up. How about you guys go watch TV?” he asked the children. “How’s about I set up some ‘Tom and Jerry’?” Lovey had met William through friends, a match everyone approved of. “Age-appropriate,” her friends and family had agreed, pleased to have Lovey squarely tucked away again, married. Her parents had never been happy about her first marriage, had never visited without awkwardness and sad sighs over the terrible absence of true grandchildren, the presence of these three half-time stepdaughters who did not particularly respond to them. In everyone else’s view, Lovey was lucky to have got out before her older husband became like a third aging parent, before the inevitable illness and decline. Those eventualities were still ahead, she supposed. He was sixty-four now, his new wife in her thirties, an undeniably beautiful woman. Young. Fresh. And William? Lovey loved him well enough, in the way of adulthood, she thought, not in the feverish former manner of witless drowning immersion, that love she’d fallen into heedlessly, as if into a body of water, with no idea of what such a thing could cost her. It had nearly killed her, when all was said and done. Meaning she’d felt like dying. She would never be that kind of lover again, never endanger herself that way again. And she understood that William, too, had been disposed of, that his ex-wife had had a similar nuclear potency for him, and that he loved Lovey now with the conscious intensity of somebody who was aware that he was exacting a kind of revenge—or, perhaps, simply acting in the belief that his ex was paying attention, that he had a need to prove that he’d survive and thrive, the victor. A victor, anyway. “I feel like an idiot,” she told William, once the children were out of earshot. “How could I let her do this to me?” “What has she done, really?” he said. “I mean, she could have got you to babysit, if she’d wanted. She could have asked you to stay over at her house with them, and you would have. Or she could have told you they were going on a date night or something. Either way, you would have hung out with the kids overnight, so it’s really not so different. When you think about it.” “I guess I thought she trusted me.” “She left her children with you. She called you when she felt like getting trashed. How much more trust do you want?” “I still feel like a fool.” “Don’t beat yourself up. Everything’s fine. See you tonight.” He provided another peck on the cheek, this time of the minty variety. And, once again, Lovey thought of her first husband—his apple-flavored mouth, his kisses that could paralyze her with brutal desire, still, still, even in absentia. Caleb came back from the television to put in a request from Celia. “She wants Cheerios. I told her no milk in the living room, then she threw the remote at me.” He touched his forehead. He was too thin, and now he had dark circles under his eyes. Lovey should have made him go to bed. From the living room came the ruckus of cartoon violence. The three-year-old liked to turn up the volume; maybe she was loud because she was a little deaf—Lovey would have to mention that possibility to Bernadette. When she next saw Bernadette. Meanwhile, Caleb was checking the game board. “Lovey,” he said, “what happened to all your money?” “What do you mean?” His face was suddenly furious, his rage as rare as his laughter, and this time aimed at her. “Don’t let me win,” he demanded. “Don’t you dare let me win!”

Cats were dying. This happens, of course. But in this case they were dying in a gory way, one after another, and my nieces, who were six and seven years old, were witnessing the deaths, and it was Christmas, the most magical, horrible, spiritual, dark, and stressful time of the year, so we—my older sister and her husband, my younger twin brothers, my sister’s in-laws, our mother and our uncle, and the other relatives who were gathered at my sister’s house in Revelstoke for the holiday—were trying to prevent more cat deaths. My sister had had five cats. She’d adopted them from the pound, because they were going to be killed. She wanted every living being to be happy. I am telling this story to you, K, even though you are a Russian Communist and a Jewish person who doesn’t believe Jesus was the son of God, and even though Christmas is an obnoxious holiday when millions of people decapitate pine trees and watch them slowly die in their living rooms, because miracles can happen on any day, and as long as man has existed he’s celebrated this weirdest time of year, the shortest stretch of sunlight, the winter solstice, as a time of fear, change, courage, and passion. I’m going to tell you the story of a miracle that happened at Christmas. I was not at a great point in my life leading up to the miracle. I was teaching creative-writing classes, but I hadn’t managed to think clearly enough to write and publish anything in years. I had Lyme disease and some co-infections that I was treating with intravenous antibiotics: babesiosis, a malaria-like virus that drains red blood cells and causes fatigue; and bartonellosis, a bacterial infection common among homeless men, which causes vascular inflammation in the brain and bouts of madness, fantastical visions, and frank or rude speech, usually set off by eating carbohydrates. I’d completed my degree in nutrition, and had luck helping clients overcome ailments, especially infertile women who wanted to conceive, so I knew which foods I should eat and which I shouldn’t. But if cake was nearby I wasn’t always able to prevent myself from having one bite; then the sugar fed the Bartonella bacteria, which commanded me to eat more, and I would, and then I’d go insane. With this in mind, I’d asked my sister to cancel the traditions of: 1) baking, frosting, and decorating forty dozen sugar cookies; 2) constructing a ginger-bread mansion; 3) baking eight pecan pies; 4) stuffing everyone’s stocking full of milk chocolate. My sister had replied that these traditions were integral to the joy of Christmas. I knew that her response was reasonable. But I was literally unable to control myself around sugar, and I worried about containing my fits of madness. I was also concerned about our family’s ability to prevent the remaining cats from dying, though my sister assured me she’d implemented a system to achieve this; I was worried, too, that no one would like the cheap, ugly Christmas presents I’d got them; I’d also become aware of my strong urge to inform my sister’s sister-in-law Kunda, a shy, forty-four-year-old neurosurgeon and Canadian Medical Officer of Health, that I knew she’d been trying to get pregnant, and that if she’d accept my help I could make it happen, despite my sister’s warning that no one was supposed to know Kunda was “trying” and that I must not accost her; finally, I was concerned, as always during family visits, about the safety and comfort of my nieces around our uncle, who was a pedophile, especially since the previous Christmas, when my sister and I weren’t vigilant enough, I’d caught him rubbing the butt of the elder girl, then six years old, in a dark, empty room. That, too, my sister assured me, was under control: the girls would never be left alone with him, and at night they’d sleep on cots in her room. Everyone in our family meant well and wanted to be a family. I know too, K, that you cringe whenever I mention the pedophile thing, and feel that it should not be placed in any story, because it overwhelms it and is too terrible for words. But I’d like to point out that my nieces are two beautiful, talented, and privileged girls, who see their grand-uncle only a few days a year; and that our uncle is not a bad man, just a sick one. So please quell any squeamishness or horror and bear in mind that it could be worse. I’d also like to say—regarding the Christmas miracle—that it was my elder niece who instigated the Kamikaze Cat Training, not me. I have two nieces but only one goddaughter. And though I’ve abandoned Catholicism, the cult that I was born into, and am one of about eight godmothers, I take my duty seriously. Perhaps I can be forgiven at least one mistake I made that holiday. Clara died first. She was eaten by a coyote. She was a nice cat. I don’t expect you to care about the cats. Clara was a long-haired Maine coon mix who loved to be petted. She went outside to use the bathroom, or frolic, or whatever cats do, around sunset, and never came back. The problem was an influx of hungry coyotes into the development where my sister lived. As the town crawled up the mountain, coyotes, bears, and lynxes were displaced from their habitats and wandered down the mountain, where they discovered the delicious new food, cat. In September, when my sister’s family barbecued on their back deck, they saw coyotes trot through the pines at their yard’s edge. Clara was eaten in October. Afterward, my nieces cried, blahblahblah. My sister, too; Clara had been her first cat. And through the years, whenever my sister felt sad about anything—fight, failed test, car accident, etc.—Clara sensed it, came to her, and sat in her lap. My sister instituted a lockdown. The cats got one outing, at dusk, to use the bathroom in the yard. They were let out for five minutes, watched, and lured back in with cooked shrimp. The other cats were Chocolate, a diabetic brown male with postnasal drip who made stinky farts and loved all people, but especially loved to sit on the chest of my brother-in-law (who once spent five thousand dollars on an operation to save Chocolate’s pancreas and life); Patches, a brindle who loved playing in the bathroom sink; Simmy, a bony Siamese loner who fought other cats and never purred; and Crow, a black cat. Crow was fit, above average size, and a mouser. She left dead mice in my sister’s bed, which displeased my sister, because Crow first bit out the eyes. Crow did not curl up in anyone’s lap. But she slept on my elder niece’s bed most nights. Wildfires burned throughout the Monashee Mountains that fall; though it was now December, there’d been no snow. Rather than disappearing, bears, lynxes, and coyotes foraged in the developments, thinking it still time to fatten up. Patches was eaten next. One evening, she sneaked past the yard’s edge when no one was looking, probably to investigate a mouse smell, and never came back. My sister made a new rule: no cats outside. But two weeks later Simmy, the Siamese who fought other cats, sped past my brother-in-law one night as he opened the door to the deck. When he lunged for her, she slipped into the forest. My sister’s family walked the woods until midnight, calling her name. When I arrived in Revelstoke for the holiday, everyone was still shell-shocked about the cat deaths. My elder niece, Adira, a pale, black-haired tomboy, would occasionally mutter, “We shouldn’t have let her out”—about Clara or Patches, I guess—and my sister would say that if she hadn’t been able to go out at all she wouldn’t have been happy; and my niece would say, “But she’d be alive”; and so forth. My sister’s house was large—its kitchen opened to a dining area and a “circle room” with a fifty-foot solar-panelled glass dome—but contained few rooms. So I was given my elder niece’s second-floor bedroom, my brothers shared my younger niece’s room, and our mother and our uncle took the sleeper couch in the library, on whose carpet Crow often peed. Because we were aware of the traumatic cat deaths, we all behaved well, even me, and when our uncle knelt down and spread his arms wide and said to my nieces, “Come give Uncle D a kiss!” and I had to watch my nieces tense up, walk stiffly toward him, and let him grab their faces and kiss their lips, I didn’t say anything. I just smiled widely and continued to behave, that afternoon, by not eating any gumdrops while my family spent several hours baking and constructing the gingerbread mansion, and we all felt, I think, good after the mansion was completed. It was late afternoon on December 23rd, and I probably never would have instituted the Kamikaze Training if it hadn’t been for what happened after the gingerbread mansion was finished, which was that we all went for a walk in the woods. The fires hadn’t reached Revelstoke. The ground in the forest was a soft red-and-bronze carpet of pine needles, and the fields around the forest were gold brush. Revelstoke is set beside a river formed by glaciers circled by six-thousand-foot-high craggy mountains, and the sky above was velveteen blue. We were all breathing hard, laughing, running along the forest path when my younger niece giggled, pointed to an opening in the pines, and said, “What’s that thing?” and ran off the path, and my mother said, “Lily, be careful, don’t touch it,” but she was touching it, and it turned out to be Simmy. The cat’s mouth was open, her gums shrunk, her teeth exposed, her tan torso gutted. My brother-in-law wrapped the cat remainder in dead leaves and carried it home, and then he and my uncle worked for an hour to dig a hole in the frozen back yard. We all felt, I think, eager to bring calm back to Christmas, so after dinner my brother-in-law went to bathe, as did my mother; my sister took refuge in doing dishes; my brothers and my younger niece played Super Mario Kart together on one living-room couch; and, on the other, my elder niece, Adira, read a book, one of her easy-readers, “Ramona Quimby, Age 8.” My uncle entered the room, still dirty from digging the cat-hole, and said kindly, “Adira, would you like a foot rub?” and the girl tensed and a small “Nnnneh” sound came out of her mouth, and my uncle sat down next to her and began rubbing her feet. “People don’t care what they’re eating as long as they’re the first ones to eat it.”Buy the print » I felt the Bartonella bacteria in my head move. They had been fed when I ate my dinner of chicken and broccoli. I’d been careful not to eat a speck of sugar, but even the carbohydrates in broccoli could feed them. I felt them grow strong and say to me, “There’s a gingerbread house on the counter. Its frosting is sugar and cream, it’s soft and warm, you can eat some!” Meanwhile, Adira sat stiffly, staring at her book but not reading; my uncle had pulled her legs onto his lap and was kneading her calves. I sat in a leather chair nearby, not reading, either, because I heard the Bartonella bacteria yelling, “Sugar! Sugar!” I don’t know how many minutes passed before my sister asked our uncle, from the kitchen, whether Adira had said that she wanted a foot rub. Our uncle answered, in a soothing, asset-management-specialist’s voice, Yes, she had; my sister responded in a clipped voice that she thought she’d heard my niece say, “Nnnneh.” Our uncle continued to rub my niece’s feet, and then my sister said angrily to my niece that she needed help in the kitchen, and Adira put her book down and walked into the kitchen without looking right or left and said quietly, “What do you want me to do?” My sister said, “Dry these dishes.” Our uncle went downstairs to shower, and I helped do dishes, too, because sugar was in the kitchen—and not just the gingerbread house. In the cupboards, I knew, there were Mint Milano cookies. Full dark pulsed outside the sliding glass doors to the deck, and a coyote yip-yip-yip-yipped in the woods. When my sister looked over her shoulder through the dark glass, I just dipped my finger into the gingerbread mansion’s white trim. From the living room, my brothers saw me do it, and one told me loudly not to eat the mansion with my fingers, because that was gross and others would get my germs, but Bartonella said, “Ignore him. Do again.” And so I finger-dipped again, and the other twin yelled that I was disgusting and was destroying the mansion, and that hurt my feelings and made me angry, so that before my sister went to bed I cornered her in the empty kitchen and told her that I did not think my nieces felt comfortable when our uncle kissed their lips, and that we should stop it. My sister, in a stretched voice, reminded me that grand-uncles kissing grand-nieces was normal, and that she’d spoken to a professional family counsellor about correct procedures in these cases, and the real me said, “O.K.,” but Bartonella me, who was larger than me and lived outside me, said, “Not O.K.” My sister added that she was the mother. The real me said, “I know.” But Bartonella me said, “You are the mother. Big deal. I am the godmother!” The counsellor had warned her, my sister said, that telling her daughters our concerns would damage their psychological development, and that the issue must never be addressed. My sister said, “Promise you won’t say anything about Uncle D to the girls,” and the real me said, “O.K.,” and she said, “Also, don’t bring up the fact that Kunda’s trying to conceive when Kunda comes over—it’s secret,” and I said, “I won’t,” but Bartonella said, “Eat sugar.” The only notable thing about Kunda, besides that she was a hot, nice, Hindi immigrant who had put herself through college by waitressing, is that she worshipped her husband, a pimply blond government secretary in her department. She met him when she was thirty-seven, and after they started dating she told me, “I love him.” I said, “Really? He’s so ugly, pink-faced, and blond,” and she said, “He’s a good one, a keeper.” She always worked the same schedule as he, so that no other female official could “get him.” For the past five years, apparently, she’d been failing to have his baby, owing to “mystery infertility,” and was racked by shame. At 3 A.M. I woke and ate half the gingerbread mansion. I’m not proud of that, but I do blame it for the rest of the story. At 7 A.M., I awakened dizzy, wanting more sugar, already tasting it in my mouth. When I entered the barely lit circle room and found Adira alone, playing Super Mario Kart on a couch, it was Bartonella who said, “Kamikaze Training.” On the loft stairs, the large black cat, Crow, curled and watched. Beside my niece, the fat brown cat, Chocolate, licked its rear. My niece paused her game and said, “What?” and Bartonella explained that I’d pay her to say a few phrases. The real me remembered my sister’s warning, but Bartonella said, “The therapist’s wrong.” Bartonella felt that our difference of opinion stemmed from the previous holiday, at our uncle’s Texas ranch, when my sister hadn’t seen what I had. Christmas night, she’d played backgammon with most of our family in the living room; I’d wandered the house looking for a quiet place to read, and gone into the dark den, where we’d all watched a movie earlier. She hadn’t seen my elder niece asleep on her belly on the couch—or feigning sleep—and our uncle seated behind her, massaging her ass. She hadn’t had to think, Christ, why me? or notice that my niece’s tiny hands were clenched. I’d told my niece I had a present for her upstairs, and she’d vaulted up and run with me to my bedroom, where I gave her an old rubber eraser; I’d got her out of there, but like a thousand-per-cent wuss I said nothing to my uncle. Later I told my sister what had happened, said we should do something, and she said we’d be more vigilant. But she hadn’t seen what I had. So, about fifteen feet from the couch, I squatted down in the posture that our uncle always adopted when he spread his arms and said, “Come give Uncle D a kiss,” and I informed my niece that I was going to tell her to give me a kiss, and that she should respond by saying she didn’t feel like giving me one, and that if she followed my instructions I’d pay her a dollar. My niece started playing her game again. I said, “I’ll pay you a dollar!” She smiled a little. She said, “Aunt D, do you know what my allowance is?” I said, “Five dollars?” She shook her head. Her hand waved upward. I said, “Is your allowance ten dollars?” Guiltily, she nodded. On the screen, she leaped over a mushroom. She whispered, “I don’t want to say it.” I knelt in his posture, I opened my arms the way he did, and I growled in his voice, being careful not to be so loud I’d wake everybody, “Come give me a kiss!” Her eyes were wide. I said, “Now you say, ‘I don’t feel kissy.’ I’ll pay you ten dollars.” On the stairs, Crow got up. Her black pupils went large. On the couch, my niece shook her head. Bartonella exhorted my niece to say it. If she can’t say it she’s a sucker, Bartonella said. If she can’t say it she’s doomed. My niece said she didn’t want to say it. I kept exhorting. I offered her the choice of two phrases—“I don’t feel kissy right now” or “No thanks, I must go clean my room”—and was telling her again that I’d pay her ten dollars, when my niece started breathing as if she couldn’t get enough air. Her posture wasn’t good; she’d hunched. She whispered, “It’s too scary.” My real self said, Stop, you’re being a jerk, you made her cry, jerk; but Bartonella said, Someone’s gotta train her. Bartonella said, “Adira, if you say it, I’ll buy you a ruby necklace.” She looked at me. I added, “And matching earrings.” I knew from experience that one could buy a “real” ruby necklace and earrings on eBay for ten dollars. My niece looked down. Wiped her cheek. Said, “O.K.” Crow licked her right paw. She stared at me. I squatted down and said in my uncle’s voice, “Come give me a kiss!” She breathed shallowly, and whispered in a high, artificial voice, “I don’t feel—”; Chocolate farted, a smell of cheese/egg filled the room, and at that second my uncle walked in and yelled, “Hellooo! What’s everybody doing?” He paused, sniffed. Crow’s tail whipped. I said, “Nothing”; Adira said, “Nothing.” My sister entered behind my uncle and announced that she’d found a mouse by her bed. She held it up by the tail. Its paws dangled. Where its eyes had been were deep holes. She stared at Crow and said, “Crow, I don’t want you to do this again.” Crow’s head lifted. She closed and reopened her eyes, then stood, stretched, and padded up the loft stairs. My sister watched her go. Then she saw my niece’s face. She looked at me. Her brow furrowed. She asked my niece why she was crying. Was it something Aunt D had said? Bartonella said, “Ohnoooyourefucked!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” and my niece said calmly, “I was remembering Simmy.” Then my sister started crying, and I did, too—for fun and because I wanted sugar so bad—and my niece re-started her video game and my uncle baked us all cinnamon buns for breakfast. That afternoon, in preparation for guests, we made forty dozen sugar cookies in the shape of jingle bells, angels, and snowmen. My sister watched me eat three, and said carefully, “Drip your I.V. yet?” and I said, “Yeah,” although I had not, and decorating cookies was so much fun that everyone got along well up until the tragedy. “Eye dew.”Buy the print » It’s hard to describe one family frosting cookies, or maybe not worth the effort, but: picture bowls with colored frosting on a kitchen island. Picture my younger niece, a round-faced, brown-eyed six-year-old in a loose red dress sitting on a stool at the island; across from her was my mother, a plump sixty-something Swede with blond hair and a puffy, sad face, bent over giving directions like “Use pink for the bell, Lily,” and “Why don’t you put three Red Hots on the holly?” I was also frosting, beside my younger niece, only I was creating, using colored jimmies, bespoke snowmen who resembled family members; I’d secretly frosted an extra bump onto one and given it curly black licorice hair to make it represent a pregnant Kunda. Outside the kitchen’s sliding glass doors, the sun shone upon golden-brown grass; it was fifty degrees; everyone was happy. My sister laid wheat noodles in vats for lasagna; her husband dumped sixteen cans of corn syrup into four mixing bowls to make eight pecan pies; my elder niece sat across from me, cutting cookies into squares and icing them yellow to resemble SpongeBob; our uncle, a handsome, red-haired retired asset-management specialist in his mid-sixties who loved to ride horses, build furniture, and collect antique books, sat on my younger niece’s other side and frosted cookies as best he could, without particular imagination, slabbing pink on a heart and yellow on a bell, and holding it up for everyone and saying, “Hey, guys. I did a bell. See?” From time to time he dropped his butter knife, and when he did he’d say, “Whoops, I dropped my butter knife,” and get down and crawl around underneath my younger niece’s stool; at which my niece, whose bare legs dangled from her dress, giggled nervously. Then our uncle would pop over to the sink, near where my sister was working, and say, “Excuse me, my knife’s dirty. I’m going to wash it.” He dropped his knife five times, I guess. I know, K, that you’ll protest that that’s not realistic: how can a man drop a butter knife five times? I’m sorry to say that it’s easy—the fingers spread, the knife drops. And you bet that part of me observed the proceedings and thought, This is crazy, I’m going to kill something, I’m gonna tear down walls or some shit! But the rational me thought, So he crawls under her stool, maybe sees panties, so what? Respect your sister’s wishes. Everybody wants a peaceful Christmas. Also, I was distracted by the fact that my sister was preparing wheat-based lasagna for dinner: my sister and my elder niece had both had Lyme disease, and were warned by doctors never to eat dairy (mucus-forming), soy (goitrogenic), or wheat, which spiked blood sugar, caused inflammation, and depressed the immune system. I knew that I was not supposed to criticize my sister’s food choices, because she’d told me not to, but the third time our uncle dropped his butter knife I felt my frustration surge, and said, “Nina, why can’t we make chicken stir-fry? You’re not supposed to eat wheat!” and my sister replied that guests were arriving, and everyone liked lasagna, and I said, “They might like gluten-free lasagna,” and she said that no one liked gluten-free lasagna, and added that normally she did not eat lasagna, but today was Christmas Eve, she was making it, and I needed to lay off her food choices, and outside a V of fat geese floated through the slate sky, and I thought wistfully how, if I could muscle-test Kunda to identify the supplements that would best replenish her iodine and support her adrenals, I could get her pregnant, and our uncle’s butter knife clattered and he said, “Whoops! I’m clumsy!” and crawled under my younger niece’s chair and the kid’s legs kicked, and I knew I shouldn’t say anything, I knew I shouldn’t cause trouble, but I felt dizzy. I saw Crow, who was crouched on the loft stairs, shimmer and float above and beside herself, as if she were three cats, and I yelled, “But I see that you have wheat bread on your counter!” and my sister said coldly, “That’s for the girls,” and I said, “But they shouldn’t eat wheat either—it’s a Frankenfood!” and I was describing wheat’s thyroid-hampering properties when my sister turned to our mother, who was petting Chocolate, and said, “Mother, I said don’t pet Chocolate, stop!” Our mother was allergic to most animals. But my sister’s reprimand probably hurt her feelings, so she ushered my nieces into the circle room and told them a Jesus story. One about his entering a town and healing a blind man by spitting on his eyes. As our mother spoke, my sister banged pots and pans. Our mother always loved Christ, but she probably loved him more after her husband died and she was left broke, not fully bipolar but not right in the head, with four kids age six and under. She prayed to Jesus for help, and later that week our father’s older brother, a confirmed bachelor and an asset-management specialist, offered to let her bring us all to his ranch and live with him, and to send her kids to college. To thank him, our mother cleaned and cooked for our uncle and the arrangement worked out, mostly. To thank God, she attended church twice weekly and spoke with Jesus for an hour every day. From the kitchen, my sister ordered our mother to stop proselytizing; our mother kept speaking. Her voice was sweet in a way it rarely was. Our mother loved Jesus. I didn’t condemn her. Personally, I agreed that many Jewish guys were extra-talented, kind, and good with touch, and I’d had “relationships” with emotionally distant, mostly unavailable Jewish guys myself, so I sympathized; my older sister did not. When my sister repeated her request, our mother yelled, “Then Jesus asked, ‘What do you see?’ and the blind man said, ‘I see people! They look like trees, walking around!’ ” and, temper shot, my sister ordered my nieces to play in their rooms. Everyone slumped in the living room. Our uncle asked who wanted to go for a walk; no one did. Our mother sneezed. Our uncle said, “I guess I’ll go by myself, then!” and left. We all read—my siblings books, my mother a magazine called Real Simple. The bells’ carol played and the tree’s lights twinkled. I was reading a biography of my favorite writer, who at forty-five begged Stalin to be allowed to finish his work before he was shot by a firing squad, when we heard a thump thump thump in the hall. “What’s that?” one of my brothers said. “I don’t know,” my sister said. We heard shrieks and giggles. “Jump!” a voice cried. We entered the hall and saw that my nieces had used their old tights to affix a coyote to the bannister. It was a donkey piñata, really; but they’d glued red-brown felt to it and taped coyote ears to its head. They’d cut holes where the donkey eyes had been, and in the holes they’d taped Doritos. My elder niece dangled a cat toy on a wire and made its attractive end bounce near the Doritos. Chocolate panted and lunged at the toy madly, fatly, his belly heaving. But each time he failed to reach it and fell with a thump. Crow watched from the top of the stairs. Adira peered at her. “Crow!” she urged. “Get it! Come!” My sister asked what they were doing. Adira muttered. My sister said, “ ‘Kamikaze Cat Training’???” “We’re teaching them to fight coyotes.” Her blue-black hair flared, tangled, around her shoulders. “We’d train Crow,” Adira said, “but she won’t come near Chocolate. He bullies her and she’s scared.” “First of all,” my sister said, “that’s not a coyote. It’s a donkey. Chocolate does not see a coyote. He sees Doritos.” Cats were not smart, she said. Cats were dumb. Crow was not being trained. She was watching the girls act stupid. No cat could kill a coyote. Furthermore, no cat was in danger, because no cat was ever going outside. My sister said that she needed help in the kitchen, and told my nieces to clean up their mess. I’m sure other families have fallen into bad holiday moods over similarly trivial incidents. But I felt a sadness. I couldn’t knock it; I don’t know why. At any rate, I had to contemplate the prospect of my family eating wheat lasagna, which had goitrogenic effects; though, regarding that, they didn’t believe me. My family found my health ideas absurd. My brothers, both dentists, had told me that my nutritionist work should be illegal, because only doctors are qualified to dispense supplements; my sister said that I’d never make rent as a nutritionist, and that I should give up. I was forbidden to offer Kunda the most common-sense advice. I considered, still with wonder, my clients who’d got pregnant: a dozen women in their mid-forties who had each had three failed I.V.F. treatments before they did protocols with me. Many had had repeat miscarriages, several had ovarian cysts, and all had tried unsuccessfully for years; but once we had replenished their minerals, supported their thyroid and adrenals, used herbs to balance their hormones, and changed their diets, they’d all conceived. They’d all had healthy, non-retarded babies. They’d sent me referrals, but not enough. My sister was right: I couldn’t pay my bills. I’d spent a few hundred bucks on Google AdWords, but I made bad ads and they didn’t work. My Web site was ugly. I’d had some unsatisfied clients, old ladies who’d gained weight instead of losing it, and they’d Yelped me, calling me a quack. I thought about how, if I helped Kunda, I’d have a district medical officer’s Yelp endorsement, and how many clients that’d get me. I didn’t give a fig about Kunda’s sensitivity; I was dizzy, from actual dizziness or from grandiosity; I thought, So what if my degree’s an Internet diploma? I was slicing onions when I noticed, beyond the kitchen’s glass doors, my mother standing in the back yard, staring contemplatively into the distant pines, under that pale vast Shuswap sky. My sister said, “What’s she doing?” We wandered toward the glass—my sister and I, her husband, my nieces behind him—and saw that my mother was watching Chocolate, who was hunched privately at yard’s edge, depositing number twos into the grass; as we observed, a handsome coyote the size of a large dog, but more yellow-gray and with a long narrow snout, strolled into the yard, bent down to Chocolate as if to whisper in his ear, and bit his throat. It pulled, ripping flesh, and the cat convulsed. The coyote plucked up Chocolate’s body and trotted into the trees. All I remember of the ensuing chaos is my sister’s husband shouting in a high, almost teen-age voice, “You weren’t supposed to let the cat out! Why’d you let the cat out? You weren’t supposed to do that!” Apparently, our mother had thought the cats were still allowed outside to use the bathroom at dusk. She was watching Chocolate, she explained. “I was right there,” she said. We had thirty minutes until our guests arrived. I dripped medicine in my room. I’d put it off because there’s a thing called a Herxheimer reaction: when you kill thousands of bacteria the remaining billions heighten their activity. I often hallucinated after dripping. I disliked feeling cold fluid slide through my veins. Also, inserting tubes into my arm-port was embarrassing and I tried to do it privately, so as not to repulse my family. Now I had to make a sixty-minute I.V. drip in thirty, so the pressure was high. I was lying on my bed, feeling logy, when the door swung open. A second later, Crow jumped onto the bed. A minute later, a hand tapped the door; Adira asked to enter. I said it was her room. “But part of me hopes there never is an Armageddon.”Buy the print » She was wearing her gray track pants and a SpongeBob T-shirt. She hopped onto the bed and lay to my left. She asked what I was doing; I said I was dripping; she nodded. She’d been “tick sick,” so she knew what it was. She reached across me to pet Crow; Crow let her. She read her book, then said, “I don’t want Crow to die,” into the pillow. I told her not to be stupid; she said, “Someone will let her outside, I know it,” and I said, “You’re being stupid” and she said, “You’re stupid,” and I said, “You’re stupid like SpongeBob” and she said, “SpongeBob’s awesome, I love SpongeBob!” and I swore that no one would let Crow out. Then I looked to my right and saw an old woman, as dark as night, bent and withered but still strong and smiling grimly. She had sharp teeth and yellow eyes, and was crouching. I jumped. My niece asked why I’d jumped. I explained that I’d dripped too fast. My niece said reasonably, “Why don’t you slow it down?” and I said because we had guests coming. I wiped my eyes, gook came out; I looked at my fingers, they’d puffed like sausages. My niece asked what I’d got her for Christmas, and I said something cheap and small, which was true. She smiled and said, “I bet I like it.” I said, “Listen, tardface, no one’s letting Crow outside.” We slept. The thing with nieces, K, is that they just happen. You may be a broke, semi-jobless loser who’s never loved, hates kids, and is repelled by marriage, and suddenly your successful sibling may have these things: babies that look like you and know your name. And there’s nothing you can do. I remember this one time, the year I took a job in Vancouver (the worst place on earth) to be near my sister, and she drove down to visit with her husband and my nieces, Lily still a baby, Adira then two, this wild fast skinny thing with an elf face and ebony hair, and we hiked through Lighthouse Park, along a trail that wound two miles through thousand-year-old cedars and descended steeply to an inlet called Starboat Cove, and my niece ran its length but on the way back got tired, and I asked if she wanted a piggy-back ride. I probably said, “Smellface, want a ride?” and she said, “Yes!” and my older sister got an odd look and asked my niece, “Do you want me to give you a piggy-back ride?”; there was a pause, these white clouds moved in the perfect sky above the cove, the ocean smacked saltily, fishily on the rocks below our feet, and my niece composed her face as if contemplating how to put things; I knew my sister would always be her one love—we all knew that—but she said, in her breathy two-year-old voice, “Sometimes when your heart is big, all you really want is Aunt D,” and I was, like, “Great, I’m fucked, I’m going to like this kid, this niece thing, forever.” We’d slept through dinner. I was glad, because I’d decided to starve myself in order to starve the Bartonella. My sister offered me food and I declined, though ravenous. I saw by the remnants on the counter that my family had consumed ten pans of buttered squash, twelve loaves of bread, and eight vats of lasagna. I was surprised but didn’t dwell on it. Holidays make people hungry. My relatives are fit and they exercise and have good metabolisms. However, the sight of ricotta droppings made me nauseous, and when I pulled the trash compactor out from the counter I saw thousands of silverfish sliding atop squash peels. My stomach rolled; they sparkled and slithered. I closed the drawer. My sister asked what was wrong; I said nothing, opened the trash, saw only squash rinds. I helped carry eight pecan pies into the circle room, where relatives were settling into couches, and a strange thing happened, or I guess not so strange, when you consider that I’d dripped my I.V. too fast; instead of my beloved family and pleasant in-laws gathered around the tree, sitting on the circle room’s several couches, I saw animals. My sister’s father-in-law, a witty, retired postal worker who was now making well-deserved cash selling disaster insurance, was a wily wild boar, wearing plaid pants, a blue polo, and a bow tie, with a bald boar’s head and bristles coming out of his large tan ears. He was telling my brother-in-law—a timid giraffe in a blue T-shirt, with two hooves poking out of each jean leg—about some fire/tornado/hurricane packages he’d sold in new developments, and his snout nodded as his maw said, “Went like hotcakes.” My sister’s mother-in-law, in real life a beautiful textile designer, was a kangaroo, her soft brown legs splayed on the couch, knitting next to my younger niece, who looked up at her adoringly; my sister, I’m sorry to say—don’t think badly of me, blame the Bartonella—was a Chihuahua who went yipping around the room bringing everyone a slice of pie by carrying each plate in her mouth, and whenever her mouth was free she’d yip, “How are you? We have mulled wine!” Everyone was talking happily. The kangaroo told my sister in a warbly voice, while stroking her pelt with one paw, that she and her husband had coyotes in their back yard, too, and had kept their cats inside for years now; she looked over to the boar, who was adjusting his bow tie, and said, “Greg’s thinking of shooting some! Good money for the pelts!” and my sister panted and yipped, “Let’s not talk about that right now! I don’t want to upset the girls! It’s Christmas!” and the kangaroo said, “Of course!” and my mother, a flushed potbellied pig who wore a pink velour dress and was seated next to a hairy gentleman with dark fur and a fedora, snorted, “Marianne, how are your fair-trade scarves doing? Are your scarves in a department store?” and all these people—or animals, I have no idea—were eating pecan pie. I knew I was hallucinating, but the part I felt sure was real was that they were consuming eight pies, and the Chihuahua yipped, “Cassandra! Do you want a piece, maybe a small one?” I shook my head. I knew she didn’t want me to eat it, even when she offered me the plate in her mouth, because her tail flattened and her mouth growled, so I declined and the Chihuahua said, “Adira? Pie?” and my niece, beside me on the couch, accepted. As she ate, a hairy orangutan with a big pink nose and beady eyes, who in real life was her uncle, the secretary, gnashed his teeth from across the room and said, “Adira, you’ve gotten taller! If you eat another bite of pie, you’ll be taller than your mother!” and the Chihuahua jumped up and down angrily and said, “Nononono, not yet!” and a beautiful gray-skinned elephant wearing a purple sari, seated on the couch beside the orangutan, touched his shoulder with her trunk, and her gray lips said, “She’s got another year before she’ll catch her mother,” and, beside me, my niece grinned. I don’t know, K, why my inflamed brain turned my district medical officer sister-in-law, a tall Hindi woman with wide cheeks and curly black hair, into an elephant—I think it was the association of elephants and Hinduism, plus I’m racist. At any rate, all was well. I’d accepted that I was hallucinating and decided to retire, pleading illness, when the Chihuahua declared it time for the most important Christmas Eve tradition: everyone must open one gift from under the tree; both my nieces exclaimed “Yay!” and in the ensuing pause the hairy gentleman across the room, who wore a fedora and a gray suit and had gray fur on his chin, appraised my elder niece and said, “Adira, you look very attractive this evening.” No one spoke. The kangaroo frowned and her needles paused; the potbellied pig turned pinker. I felt my niece push backward, into the couch. I thought, Ah well, it’s done. I don’t know why I thought that, except that suddenly I tasted corn syrup, lard, and stale pecans in my mouth; I don’t know who put them there. The Chihuahua yipped, “Uncle D! You should compliment Lily! Lily has a new dress on and a bow in her hair! Adira’s wearing old track pants and a dirty T-shirt! Lily is the one who looks pretty!” The distinguished gentleman turned to my younger niece, who was now admiring her own dress, and said, “Lily, you also look very pretty.” Everyone observed my nieces. As the pie sugar hit my blood I felt a surge of—adrenaline? neuron death? It was true about the track pants—for the last year, my elder niece had worn nothing but nylon track pants, because anything else bothered her skin. The word “skin” flashed through my mind as I considered this, and I felt wired, alert, crazed, and I saw the elephant across the room. Her gray skin was wrinkled, and as she peered at the grandfather clock in the hall I remembered that wrinkles indicate iodine deficiency, and that the elephant was trying to get pregnant, and I yelled, “Kunda, do you think lately you have wrinkles?” The kangaroo frowned and said, “Everyone has wrinkles!” The Chihuahua jumped up and down and said, “Yes, that was rude! Everyone has wrinkles!” I was implementing a business strategy from a book called “How to Master the Art of Selling,” whereby you ask your potential clients questions they’re bound to say “yes” to. You start with something easy, like “It’s a nice day out, isn’t it?” and keep going. Once they get in the pattern of saying “Yes,” they can’t stop—that’s the idea. I knew certain things about Kunda, because she was a woman suffering from infertility, plus she was an elephant, so I said, “Kunda, I suspect your body temperature’s low. Do you often feel cold?” The elephant stared at me. Her trunk curled down. She said, “I do feel cold often. Why?” I looked at her gray, bald head and sad brown eyes. I said, “Kunda, your eyebrows are thinning at the outer edges, aren’t they? In fact, I don’t think you have eyebrows at all! Are you losing hair in the shower drain?” The elephant’s hooves went to her forehead. Her mouth dropped open. The orangutan next to her frowned. Everyone stared at me. I thought, Yes! I said, “Kunda, do you crave sugar in the afternoon? Salt? Caffeine?” The elephant peered at me. Slowly she said, “Yes. Why?” “Ignore her!” the Chihuahua yipped. “She’s tick sick! She has Lyme disease!” Beside me, my older niece said, “Aunt D, what are you doing?” The kangaroo said that she didn’t think this was a nice conversation. I peered at the elephant, on the couch. “Kunda,” I said. “You look big to me. Do you have belly fat? Are you having trouble losing weight?” In reality, K, Kunda was slender. But I knew that women in their forties are paranoid about everything, and for no reason that I understand I was intent on showing Kunda that she was suffering from iodine deficiency. I said, “You’re cold and fat around your middle, right?” The elephant nodded. The orangutan yelled, “I won’t stand for this! You’re saying things that are totally inappropriate!” It came at me from across the room; I was afraid, in fact terrified, and my niece whispered, “Aunt D, stop,” and I yelled, “Too bad, Kunda. Those are all symptoms of a deficiency in iodine, the mineral most essential for fertility. That’s why you can’t conceive!” The orangutan stopped inches from me. “That’s enough!” he said. The elephant turned mauve. She rose clumsily and headed toward the kitchen. I struggled to frame my closer as a “Yes” question. I yelled, “Kunda, if a cheap nutritionist in-law who charges cheap rates could help you fix these problems cheaply, you’d want help, wouldn’t you?” “If you pay enough, they’ll let you swim with whatever animal you want.”Buy the print » Suddenly it was done. Instead of an elephant I saw a lithe, forty-something Indian woman striding toward my sister’s back door. She opened the door, closed it carefully behind her, and walked into the dark yard. My sister, not a Chihuahua but a tallish blond investment banker with great skin and runner’s legs, twisted my right wrist. She said, “Everything you said is unacceptable.” Some of our relatives—our gray-suited uncle, his mouth curled as if a friend had told him a joke; our mother, in her pink velour dress; my sister’s husband’s parents, the ex-postal worker with his bald head and bristly black brows and his slope-faced, brown-eyed wife—stared at me, appalled, from a couch; on a love seat, one of my brothers leaned toward the other and whispered, “We might commit her; Nina will pay.” Beyond the glass dome of the circle room was clear black sky; under the Christmas tree sat mounds of gifts decked in sparkling gold-and-red paper and tied with organza ribbons. I said, “I apologize.” I kept saying it. My sister sighed and said that someone should go to Kunda; her husband said that he would, but my sister said, “No, let me.” She walked through the kitchen, slid the heavy glass door open, and strode out. Behind her, the black cat sauntered across the kitchen tiles and out the door and into the grass. It padded left, past the swing set, and headed into the trees. That’s how we reëntered the forest, now frigid and pitch black. Though it was late, all of us lurched through the woods, calling the cat’s name. My sister didn’t own enough flashlights for everyone, so we searched in clusters and pairs. The trees were dark, still shapes; I heard twigs crack and people in distant places call the cat’s name. It was terrible and no one spoke much, but at one point my sister ended up next to me, and said, “I don’t want to discuss this evening right now, because I’m too upset, but . . .” She’d worked hard to make the holiday nice for everyone, she said, and to enable everyone to get along. She’d worked hard to make me happy, too, and it seemed that all I wanted to do was criticize her and make people upset; I wasn’t myself, and she was curious—what had she done to me, to deserve this? And I was, like, Christ. I felt terrible. I knew she’d spent days shopping for gifts, party favors, groceries, stocking stuffers; she’d bought us all snow boards and ski passes—time she barely had, since she worked eighty hours a week at her banking job. She tried so hard and no one thanked her. “I’m so sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to, I’m sick—” and she said, “Don’t use that excuse.” She’d had Lyme disease, too, she said. Maybe she hadn’t had Bartonella, but she’d had spirochetes in her nervous system, they’d affected her neurologically, and she hadn’t acted like I was now; her throat caught. The real me felt ashamed and said, “You’re right, I’m so sorry,” but Bartonella heard her say, “Bartonella,” and awakened. Bartonella me yelled, “You want to know why? Because I’m pissed at you, bitch!” and she gasped and asked how dare I call her that? And added that, truthfully, she was angry at me, too; I heard branches rustle and, distantly, someone call, “Who’s there?” but, out of my head, I said, “Bring it on, bitch! Here’s my chin!” I saw my sister frown and rear back. Then an immense fist like a sledgehammer punched my jaw. I fell on my butt on the trail. An orange pain was my jaw and also the world. I had three faces and saw three sisters. It wasn’t she who’d hit me—it was the orangutan. Rather, the secretary, Kunda’s husband; I heard him say, “I’ve never punched anyone before, I was just so mad about what she said to Kunda,” and my sister muttered, “Done is done,” and the willowy black shadow of one of my brothers said, “She sort of . . .” and the other’s said, “Deserved it,” and the secretary touched my face and said, “No worries, it’s not dislocated”; the others showed up, my nieces asked what happened, my sister’s mouth opened and closed, as did the secretary’s, and I said, “I fell and hit my jaw on a stone.” My sister announced that we weren’t finding Crow tonight and should go home. My nieces protested that we couldn’t leave Crow, so my sister told them that she was probably hiding in a safe place in the forest, just waiting for daylight to come home. Adira begged us to leave the sliding door open for the cat. My sister didn’t want to wake up to raccoons in the kitchen, but my niece insisted. So my sister—who couldn’t deny her daughters anything—said O.K. The weird thing about blood-sugar issues is that they don’t go away just because you’ve had a bad Christmas. I woke up at 3 A.M. The house was quiet. I guessed everyone was asleep. I figured I could sneak into the kitchen and eat half a pecan pie and no one would know. I entered the kitchen and found half a pecan pie, covered in foil, on the counter. I unwrapped it. I already tasted it in my mouth, even before eating it; that’s the horrible thing. Stale pecans, wheat crust, lard, and corn syrup—I was desperate for it. Outside, it was coal-black. Cold wind blew through the open door. I stuck my finger in the pie and scooped out a big blob. The pecan-syrup blob was moving toward my mouth when I heard a high-pitched cry, outside in the yard. I felt afraid. I put the blob back in the pie tin, and stepped away; a black ball shot into the kitchen, moving toward me fast, uttering a high sound, once-cat, but it moved on its belly, pulled itself forward by using its front paws, which scraped madly, nails clicking, across the floor; it had no legs, only a head and a torso, it seemed to roll past me, it paused between the circle room and the kitchen and looked at me. It was Crow, but her back legs seemed to have disappeared—she was half a cat and her face looked gigantic, puffed to twice its size. I’ve never been so terrified of anything in my life, and nothing else has ever made me so sad as hearing that pitiful cry and seeing the cat with no hindquarters. My sister appeared in the hall. “God,” she said. “We have to get it out of here. I don’t want the girls to see it, it will upset them—” My elder niece appeared. She said simply, “The coyote ate her legs,” and walked toward her cat, and my sister yelled, “Don’t touch her! She’s hurt, she may bite you,” but the kid knelt by the cat and pressed her hand along its back; it didn’t move, and my sister rushed forward to pull my niece away, but as soon as she neared the animal it opened its mouth, its enormous swollen face twitched, and it released two gelatinous orbs. Once they came out, the cat’s face became normal-sized. The whitish blobs slid across the floor—golf-ball size, like undercooked eggs with red tendrils. In one I could see the golden disk and the dark pupil. My sister said, “What are those? Ugh!” My niece said, “She got them.” Revelstoke is an unusual town. The veterinary clinic’s reception contains Oriental rugs and damask couches, and the clinic stays open all night, even on Christmas. We took the cat in and they operated immediately, saving one hind leg, which had been folded behind her; the technicians weren’t certain, but they said that the thighs appeared serrated by coyote’s teeth, and all seven of them—there were seven technicians—said they’d never seen a cat get away from a coyote, and that it was a miracle that she was alive. We left the clinic at 6 A.M., the pet’s remaining leg in a cast, and I’m sure you saw this coming, K, but the sky had grayed over, and, as we left the clinic and saw the firs on the distant mountains, down came white flakes, huge, far apart, as large as in picture books, the first of the year, and they fell onto our tongues, as if the earth were saying, “Jesus is Lord,” or else, “Here is some snow,” or just, “Global warming hasn’t killed me yet, I’m alive.” A somewhat odd thing happened that morning. My sister, who stuck up for me when she was a kid, but whom no one stuck up for—ever, in any way—thanked our mother and uncle for coming, and told our uncle that he had to go. Some say that those born between December 22nd and January 19th carry existential sadness within them. They say that Capricorns are at the end of their line; everything they want to do, they have to do within this life. Perhaps that’s why they’re stubborn plodders who’ll trek step by tiny step to reach their goals. I’m a hundred per cent sure that, as a Russian Communist, K, you’ll say that that’s bunk, and that I should never mention astrology in a story again. For what it’s worth, I write to you as one child of winter to another.

One Saturday afternoon in summer, Levinson, self-proclaimed refugee from the big city, sat at his favorite sidewalk café on Main Street, sipping an iced cappuccino and admiring the view. He felt, without vanity, the satisfaction of a man who knows he has made the right choice. This was no boring backwater, as his friends had warned, no cute little village with one white steeple and two red gas pumps, but a lively, thriving town. Women in smart dresses and broad-brimmed straw hats sashayed past within reach of his arm. Over the café railing, he watched husbands in baseball caps pushing baby carriages with one hand and leading dogs with the other, while wives in oversized sunglasses gripped the handles of bright-colored shopping bags stuffed with blouses and bargain jeans. There were aging bikers with black head wraps and tattooed forearms, Japanese tourists in flowered shirts taking pictures with iPhones, swaggering teen-age boys in sleeveless tees and low-slung cargo shorts, a stern Hasid in a long black coat and a black high-crowned hat, laughing girls with swinging hair and tight short-shorts and platform-wedge sandals. Even the shops and buildings seemed to be moving, breathing, changing shape as he watched. Across the street, two men behind a strip of yellow caution tape were lifting a plate-glass window into the renovated front wall of Mangiardi’s Restaurant. Farther down, on a stretch of sidewalk cordoned off by a wooden partition, workers in hard hats were smashing crowbars into the brick façade of the Vanderheyden Hotel. And still farther away, where the stores and restaurants ended and the center of town gave way to muffler shops and motels, a tall red crane swung an I-beam slowly across the sky, in the direction of a new three-level parking garage on the site of a torn-down strip mall. Levinson had moved here nearly a year ago, when the consulting firm he worked for opened an upstate branch. He’d never regretted it. The city was a lost cause, what with the jammed-up traffic, the filthy subways, the decaying neighborhoods and crumbling buildings. The future lay in towns—in small, well-managed towns. He’d put a down payment on a shady house on a quiet street of overarching maples, but he hadn’t kissed the city goodbye in order to sit back with his hands on his belly and live a soft life. He still worked as hard as ever, often staying at the office till six or seven; on weekends, he mowed his lawn, caulked his windows, cleaned his gutters, shovelled the drive. He was seeing two women—dinner and a movie, no more—while waiting for the right one to come along. He had a decent social life; the neighbors were friendly. He was forty-two years old. On weekends and evenings, whenever he was free, Levinson liked nothing better than to explore the streets of his town. Main Street was always alive, but that wasn’t the only part of town with an energy you could feel. On residential streets, houses displayed new roofs, renovated porches, bigger windows, fancier doors; in outlying neighborhoods, empty tracts of land blossomed with medical buildings, supermarkets, family restaurants. During early visits to the town, he’d seen a field of bramble bushes with a sluggish stream change into a flourishing shopping plaza, where stores shaded by awnings faced a parking lot studded with tree islands and flower beds, and shortly after his move he’d watched, day after day, as a stretch of woods at the west end of town was cut down and transformed into a community of stone-and-shingle houses on smooth streets lined with purple-leaved Norway maples. You could always find something new in this town—something you weren’t expecting. His city friends, skeptics and mockers all, could say what they liked about the small-town doldrums, the backwater blues, but that didn’t prevent them from coming up for the weekend, and even they seemed surprised at the vitality of the place, with its summer crowds, its merry-go-round in the park, its thronged farmers’ market, and, wherever you looked, on curbsides and street corners, in vacant lots and fenced-off fields, men and machines at work: front-end loaders lifting dirt into dump trucks, excavators digging their toothed buckets into the earth, truck-mounted cranes unfolding, rising, stretching higher and higher into the sky. After paying at the cash register and dropping a couple of quarters into the tip jar, Levinson set off on his post-cappuccino Main Street stroll. Though by now he knew the eight-block stretch of downtown as well as his own back yard, he was always coming upon things that took him by surprise. In the Chinese takeout, the tables were pushed to one corner and a man with a power drill was boring into a wall; a sign in the window announced the opening of a new Vietnamese restaurant. From a platform on the scaffolding that rose along the façade of a nearby building, men in hard hats were adding scroll-shaped support brackets to an apartment balcony. A new Asian bistro, which had taken the place of an Indian restaurant, now had a snazzy terrace reached by a flight of granite steps; two men on ladders were installing a dark-green awning. Half a block away, a long section of sidewalk had been closed off by an orange mesh fence, forcing Levinson to walk on a narrow strip of street bordered by a low wall of concrete blocks. Behind the mesh fence, he saw a bucket truck, a few men in lime-green vests and white hard hats, piles of bricks and lumber, a man in a T-shirt and safety goggles standing on the platform of a scissor lift, and an orange safety cone with a small American flag stuck in the hole at the top. After another block, Levinson turned left onto West Broad and walked over to one of his favorite spots: a fenced-off construction site on the corner of Maplewood. Here the foundation was being dug for an apartment building with ground-floor retail spaces, on land formerly occupied by the parking lot of a small department store. Through an open door in the wooden fence, Levinson looked down at the reddish earth, at the blue cab and silver drum of a concrete mixer, at piles of mint-green plastic sewer pipes. He watched with pleasure as a yellow backhoe lifted a jawful of earth and debris into the bed of a high-piled dump truck, which immediately started up a dirt slope that led to the street. One thing Levinson liked about his adopted town was the way you could follow its daily evolution, chart its changes, pay close attention to every detail, without feeling, as you did in the city, that your head was about to crack open. Sleepy villages held no charm for him. His interest had quickened when the real-estate agent told him about high-tech businesses coming to town, bidding wars being waged for prime locations, fancy condos on the way. The housing market was on the upswing. Lately he’d been noticing even more activity than usual, as shops and restaurants changed hands, apartment complexes sprang up, old buildings came crashing down. Fields of shrubs and weed clumps sent up clouds of brown dirt under the blades of dozers. As Levinson crossed Main and headed back toward his neighborhood, he felt the familiar sensation of downtown trickling away in two blocks of bars and restaurants, and then, as if suddenly, you found yourself in a world of tree-lined streets and two-story houses with shutters and front porches. For a moment, it seemed that he’d come to another, quieter town. The impression quickly gave way to a sharper sense of things: a man stood on a ladder slapping paint onto the side of a house, workmen on a roof were laying the rafters of a new dormer, and, in yard after yard, people were planting bushes, trimming trees, scraping paint from window frames, rushing to open doors as deliverymen carried couches, refrigerators, and dining-room tables along front walks and up steps. When Levinson reached his block, he waved to old Mrs. Breyer, sitting on her wicker settee on the broad front porch. “Nice work,” he said, pointing to the recently replaced porch ceiling, with its glistening walnut stain, and the newly painted posts. She relaxed into one of her wide, girlish smiles, keeping her teeth covered by her lips. Levinson passed a freshly laid driveway that still gave off a smell of tar, stopped to examine a red flagstone walk that only a week ago had been squares of concrete, and, stepping aside to let a neighbor girl in a brilliant pink helmet ride past on her training bike, he climbed his steps and sank into one of the two cushioned chairs beside his round iron table. In the warm shade, Levinson half closed his eyes. Tomorrow, Sunday, he was flying down to Miami for two weeks to stay with his sister and nephews and visit his mother in assisted living. It would be good to see the family, good to get away for a while. When you liked a place, you liked leaving it so that you could look forward to coming back. It was his town now, his home. Sometimes he wished he’d taken up another line of work, like civil engineering or town planning; he enjoyed thinking about large spaces, about putting things in them, arranging them in significant relations. Levinson felt the muscles of his neck relaxing. As he drifted toward sleep, he was aware of the sounds of his neighborhood: the clatter of skateboard wheels, the zzzroom zzzroom of a chainsaw, the dull rumble of a closing garage door, a burst of laughter, and always the chorus of hand mowers and riding mowers, of hedge trimmers and pressure washers, of electric edgers and power pruners, and, beneath or above them all, like the beat at the hidden heart of things, the ring of hammers through the summer air. When he opened his eyes, he was surprised to find that he was no longer sitting in the shade of his front porch. For some reason he was lying in a bed, in a room with a dark bureau slashed by a stripe of sun. As he stared at the bureau, it seemed to him that it was becoming more familiar, as if, at any moment, he might discover why it was there. Ah, he was in his bedroom—the sun was shining between the shade and the window frame. How had it happened? Levinson tried to remember. The walk along Main, the return to the front porch, the flight to Miami, his mother’s frail hands—of course. He’d returned from Miami and hurled himself into a frantic week of work, staying late at the office and collapsing into bed immediately after dinner. Now it was Saturday; he’d slept later than usual. It was time for his morning routine—breakfast, the lawn, the calls to his sister, his mother, and his brother, Murray, in San Diego, the cleanup of the garage—before the walk into town for his bagel and iced cappuccino. Then dinner with a few friends at eight. “Whatever doesn’t kill me makes me gain weight.”Buy the print » As Levinson stepped onto his front walk, he noticed with surprise that the Mazowskis’ house, across the street, had grown larger. It stretched out on both sides, almost to the property lines. When he turned right and set off for town, he saw that the house of his neighbors the Sandlers was stucco instead of white shingle. It all must have happened while he was away. Walking along, he was struck by other changes: the Jorgensen house had a second porch above the first; in front of what’s-his-name’s place, a tall hedge with a latticed entrance gate had replaced a row of forsythia bushes; and, as Levinson gave a wave to Mrs. Breyer, sitting on her porch, he saw, high overhead, a third story, with an octagonal tower at one end. On block after block, the houses were escaping their old forms, turning into something new. He passed a half-finished side porch propped up on brick piers; men in hard hats were pacing the blond floorboards. A nearby house had big bay windows and an attached garage that Levinson didn’t recall seeing before. On one corner, the sidewalk was closed to pedestrians; beyond a portable chain-link fence, a small white house with a red roof stood entirely enclosed by the studs, beams, and rafters of a much larger house, which was being constructed around it. Levinson tried to imagine what would happen to the original house—would it remain inside, a house within a house?—but his attention was distracted by the neighboring house, a new two-and-a-half-story mansion faced in stone, with a roof garden where a couple sat dining in the shade of an arbor. Forcing himself to lower his eyes, because there was only so much you could take in before exhaustion struck you down, Levinson stared at the familiar sidewalk as he climbed the steep street leading to Main. When he reached the corner, he looked up and stopped in bewilderment. A five-story department store with immense display windows rose before him. It stood in the place once occupied by Jimmy’s News Corner, Antique Choices, and the Main Street Marketplace. Next to the new building was a deep courtyard crowded with tables, where people sat drinking dark beer; a sign said “GRAND OPENING.” Everywhere Levinson looked, he saw new shops, new buildings—an ad agency, a Moroccan restaurant, a hair boutique, a gelato parlor. There was even a roofed arcade, with a row of shops stretching back on each side. The old savings bank was still there, with its high front steps and its fluted columns, but it stood two stories taller and was connected to a new building by a walkway enclosed in glass, in a space occupied three weeks earlier by a men’s clothing store and a wine shop; and though City Hall still stood across from the bank, one wall was covered by scaffolding and the front steps were concealed behind a plywood fence, through which he could hear sounds of drilling and smashing. As Levinson made his way toward his iced cappuccino, he did his best to take it all in. The Vietnamese restaurant, which three weeks ago had replaced the Chinese takeout, was now a shop specializing in fancy chocolates. The old Vanderheyden Hotel looked like a Renaissance palazzo. The nail salon was a Swedish-furniture store. And Levinson’s sidewalk café, his Saturday retreat, with its iron railing and fringed umbrellas, the place he had longed for in Miami, was now Louise’s Dress Shoppe, with racks of sale dresses and silk scarves standing outside, under an awning. Scarcely had he registered his disappointment when he noticed a new sidewalk café a few stores down, where dark-red fabric stretched between iron posts. Soon he was sitting in the shade of a table umbrella, drinking an iced cappuccino and trying to get a grip on things. The changes were stunning, almost impossible to believe, but a lot could happen in three weeks, especially in a town like this. Levinson was all too familiar with the kind of person who deplored change, who swooned over old buildings and spoke vaguely but reverently of earlier times, and though he was startled and a little dizzied by the sight of the new downtown, which made him wonder whether he had fallen asleep on his front porch and was dreaming it all, he looked out at the street with sharp interest, for he was wide awake, drinking his iced cappuccino on a Saturday afternoon in town, and was not one of those people who, whenever the wrecking ball swung against the side of a building, felt that a country or a civilization was coming to an end. Invigorated by his rest, Levinson set off on his Saturday stroll along Main, determined to let nothing escape him. He examined the displays in the windows of new stores, observed the redesigned façades of half-familiar buildings. He passed the marble steps and broad glass doors of something called XQuisiCo Enterprises, where he remembered a jeweller’s and a cigar store. At the end of Main, he turned onto West Broad and walked to the corner of Maplewood, to see how his construction site was coming along. It was no longer there. Along the entire length of Maplewood, on both sides, five-story brick apartment complexes with broad balconies rose above new stores shaded by ornamental pear trees. Levinson tried to recall the earlier street—the wooden fence with the opening, an office-supply store, Nagel’s Dry Cleaning—but he became uncertain, maybe he was leaving out a building or two, it wasn’t a street he knew particularly well. He walked along the new Maplewood, checking the shopwindows, looking up at a family having lunch on a fourth-floor balcony hung with baskets of flowers; he passed an opening between buildings, which gave a glimpse of a wide courtyard, where a clown with painted tears on his white face stood juggling dinner plates in a circle of seated children holding balloons. At the next street, he turned left toward Main. He had a clear view of the new sidewalk café, with its red fabric railing; next door, workmen were replacing brick with stone, under a sign that read “COMING SOON.” He had a confused sense, as he crossed Main Street, that the stores were no longer the same, that everything had changed again, but surely he was mistaken, an effect of overexcitement in the oppressive afternoon heat. Tired now, Levinson began to make his way home. When he reached the tree-lined streets at the outskirts of his neighborhood, he realized that he must have made a wrong turn somewhere, for he was passing houses he had never seen before, though some seemed dimly familiar. Maybe it was a street he knew, whose houses had all received new breezeways, gables, porches, add-ons. Or maybe the old houses had all been torn down and replaced with new ones. He hadn’t gone far when a row of orange-and-white striped barrels blocked his way. Beyond the barrels, people stood watching something in a yard. It seemed to Levinson that, between two houses with adjoining lawns, a paver fed by a dump truck was laying asphalt on a new roadbed, leaving only narrow strips of grass on both sides. Levinson turned back. He found another street, where he spotted a porch that he thought he recognized, though he could no longer be sure. He turned right, passed a half-finished house with walls wrapped in pink insulation, and came to a line of sawhorses stretching across the road. He turned onto another street. From a porch, someone waved. It was old Mr. Gillon, who lived on Levinson’s street, a block from his house. The heat had exhausted Levinson. His temples throbbed; his forearms glistened. Under familiar branches, unknown housefronts shimmered in the sun. A bike helmet lay sideways on a front lawn, like a gaping mouth. Suddenly, his house rose up. Levinson climbed onto the porch, gripping the iron rail. He sank into one of the chairs. His head was hot. Across the street, a large backhoe stood on the front lawn, blocking half of the Mazowskis’ house. In the warm shade, Levinson closed his eyes. When he opened his eyes, a light rain was falling. Under the dark-gray sky, porch lights were on, windows glowed yellow. On the strip of lawn between his sidewalk and the street, a sawhorse sat next to a safety cone. He imagined them coming closer, advancing along his front walk. In the dusky air, the houses across the way reminded him of a childhood trip he’d taken with his parents, to someplace in Arizona or New Mexico. Through the window of his hotel room, he had stared out anxiously at the wrong-looking houses, with their strange chimneys, their make-believe doors. Levinson stiffened: the dinner. It was already seven-twenty-five. He wouldn’t have time for a shower—just enough time to towel himself down, change his clothes. Ten minutes later, when Levinson stepped out his front door, the rain had stopped; a crack of pale sky showed through the sombre clouds. The street lights had come on. On his front lawn, he saw a length of gleaming steel pipe. Across the street, a wire fence ran along the curb, enclosing the front yard and the backhoe. Three men, dark against the evening sky, stood on the roof of the Mazowskis’ house. On the side of the Sandlers’ house rose a two-story scaffold tower that Levinson hadn’t noticed before. A man in a hard hat stood next to it, with his fists on his hips, looking over at him. Levinson backed his car out of the drive and headed down his block in the direction of Main. The restaurant where he was meeting his friends was on the far side of town, out by the new mall. At the end of the second block, Levinson’s street was closed off. Men in hard hats stood bent over jackhammers as they tore up the road. Levinson turned right. Halfway down the street, a large truck with two safety cones on its front bumper stood in the way. A man with an orange stripe across his jacket was waving him to the right, where a narrow lane ran between back yards. At the end of the lane, Levinson turned onto a street that felt unfamiliar, though it couldn’t have been far from his house. The sun had dropped beneath the rooflines; against the darkening sky, a crane was lowering something onto a roof. At the next corner, he turned again, but he was no longer certain whether he was heading toward Main or away from it. He passed a large house where a crowd of people were laughing on a wraparound porch. Someone raised a glass, as if to him. In an orange glow of sodium-vapor lamps, Levinson kept looking for a street that would lead him to the center of town, but he found himself in an unknown neighborhood, where a stretch of half-built houses gave way to a dark field. Behind a chain-link fence, a tower crane rose up beside an immense frame of steel beams. Levinson turned around and headed back. It was seven-fifty-five. He came to a street of two-story houses with front porches. It seemed to be his own street, though it was hard to tell. At the end of the block, men with lights on their hats were excavating a front yard. Levinson lowered his window. “How do I get to Main?” he shouted. “That way!” one of the men called, waving him to the left. Levinson turned left; in the light of a flickering street lamp he saw a half-constructed house with roof trusses in place. In the blackness of the next yard he made out a dim foundation covered by floor joists. The street came to an end; an unpaved path led into what appeared to be a forest. A metal sign leaning against a tree read “MEN AT WORK.” As Levinson followed the path, branches scraped sharply against the side of his car. The path widened, began to rise; guardrails appeared; he was on a ramp; all at once Levinson found himself on a six-lane highway, where ruby tail-lights rushed away into the distance. On the other side of the divider, yellow headlights came streaming toward him. Under a blue-black sky, Levinson entered the second lane, passed below a sign with a name and exit number he did not recognize, and rode off into the night.

Most of the presenters at the conference in Key West were somewhat old, and the audience was very old, which was something J was accustomed to, being among people considerably older than herself, since it is the older people, generally, who have money, and who thus support the younger people, who have youth. Or something. The young have something to offer. J had accepted the invitation to the writers’ conference in the middle of a cold February, because it had promised a warm idyll for the following January, and because she was promised a “plus-one.” When the time came, months later, to choose the plus-one, J had invited not her gentle husband but her stepmother, Q, to join her. Q’s latest business venture, an online Vitamins Hall of Fame, had failed. Also, Q’s hair, which into her sixties had been a shiny Asian black—Q was Burmese—had begun to gray, and when she dyed it at home it hadn’t gone back to black but had instead turned a kind of red. J thought that this sounded like no big deal, but it was apparently very distressing to Q. Same with the slightly below-normal results from a bone-density scan. “Do you think when someone sees me on the street they think to themselves, There goes an old woman?” Q asked. “No,” J said. This was on the phone. “I doubt they think anything at all.” Then J felt bad for saying that. That was when she impulsively invited Q to go down to Key West with her the following January. J lived in Pittsburgh and Q lived near Cleveland, so their communication lacked for enlightening facial expressions. J had recently e-mailed Q, jokingly, about its being an ideal time to invest in Greek yogurt. Q wrote back saying that she’d bought ten thousand shares of Groupon’s I.P.O. J couldn’t imagine where Q had got the money. After the initial offering, Groupon’s shares sank dramatically. It was rumored that there might have been fraud, insider information—why had Q thought she could swim with sharks?! But Q hadn’t purchased shares; she had just been joking. Q seemed upset that J had even briefly believed that she had purchased Groupon shares. Only a sucker would do such a thing. Did J really think she was such a sucker? Was that what she thought? J would definitely pack reading for their week together. At the airport in Key West, J and Q were to be picked up by M, who was somewhat old, or old on paper if not old in person, and who was one of the heads of the event. Though J had never met M, she had been informed that M’s wife, who had been quite young, or younger, had died not that long ago. Of something. One of the young-woman cancers was the impression she had. They had only just got married when the diagnosis came. Also, J knew that M wore an eye patch. The eye patch was from an injury years before that involved a champagne cork launched haphazardly by a third party, unnamed, and surely still feeling guilty. “Please don’t stare at the eye patch,” J instructed Q. “I’m telling you about it in advance, so that you don’t stare.” “I would never stare at an eye patch,” Q said. They exited from the plane directly into the outdoors and then proceeded from sunshine into the small terminal building for baggage claim. Above the airport entrance gate, there were full-color, life-size statues of tourists or immigrants or both, a crowd of them, with sculpted suitcases, gathered together, in greeting or suffering; the statues resembled somewhat melted Peeps marshmallow candies. J and Q walked under them and into a tiny airport lobby. There was M! The eye patch made him easy to spot. “Everything good?” he asked. Yes, yes. “And you’re . . .” He extended his hand to Q, who said that she was Q, which didn’t clear up much, but enough. They headed out to the parking lot and the surprise of a little green convertible M.G. It was a sunny afternoon and the wide road went along sandy beaches at the soft water’s edge. Just driving this little car, ideal for two, must be traumatically lonely for him, J found herself thinking. Sorrow’s black wing now shades his brow, she thought, as they continued at twenty-five miles an hour on the quiet shoreline road, past occasional seagulls and the foam of gentle waves. J was riding shotgun. Q was in the tiny back, digging between the cushions, in search of a seat-belt buckle that was not to be found. M was smiling. He was a prominent popular historian. He chatted to J about the upcoming events, where dinner was that evening, what the expected weather was, who had already arrived, and where they were staying— “You must feel like a bride,” J said. “A what?” M said. “Like a bride,” J repeated. “Bride? Hmm. Well. No. I don’t feel like a bride. What do you mean?” J felt obliged to stand by the tenuous comparison. “You know: all this planning, now it’s happening.” “I see. Well. No,” M repeated. “I don’t feel like a bride. I don’t really do much of the organizing. We have staff that does that. My position is mostly honorary.” “Of course . . .” “I just send a few initial e-mails to get things started. I don’t do the real work. It’s just that I live here. Many of us have lived here, part time, for decades. It’s very nice—you’ll see.” “Wait, why is he supposed to feel like a bride?” Q called out from the back seat. “Not like a bride!” J corrected. “I was wrong about that.” M dropped J and Q off at their hotel, Secret Paradise, and said that he looked forward to seeing them at dinner. J avoided saying what for some reason came brightly to mind: God willing. The clock read 2:22 P.M. Their accommodation had a spacious bedroom, living room, kitchen, and luxury shower, in addition to a large private deck. Instead of the blank feel of a modern hotel room, it had the eccentric collectible-salt-shakers-and-wicker atmosphere of a specific personality. “I could never live in this kind of a place,” Q said. “With so many things on the wall and on the tables. I mean, it’s nice. But it’s very American.” J didn’t like the décor, either, but she said, “Well, we are in America. Sort of.” “That man who picked us up didn’t look like a writer,” Q continued. “He was so tall. Like a lawyer, or a businessman.” “He’s more a historian.” “A writer looks more like— There was that nice dog cleaner, remember? The guy who wrote poetry and did at-home dog cleaning? You remember, he had that van, and would come to the house, and he would clean Puffin just there in the driveway; it was an excellent business idea that he had.” J was unpacking her things. “With animals it’s called grooming, not cleaning. Cleaning is for carpets.” Q lay on the sofa and turned the television to the Weather Channel. J went out onto the deck. A wooden fence suspended on posts a foot or so off the sand blocked the view of the ocean, which was odd, though it did offer privacy. J opened to the beginning of her book, which investigated the disappearance, in 1938, of Ettore Majorana, an Italian particle physicist. Majorana’s disappearance might have been an escape, or might have been a suicide, or might have been a murder by Mussolini’s government, or might have been something else. Majorana had for years behaved strangely: he hadn’t wanted to publish his work, or cut his hair, or see people—including his mother—whom he had previously enjoyed seeing. He may have been paranoid, or merely depressed. His work might or might not have been relevant to research into developing an atomic bomb. The historical moment made internal states that would normally be considered deranged—anxiety, grandiosity—seem quite possibly reasonable. Whatever the case, Majorana withdrew all the money from his bank account, boarded a boat to Palermo, and sent an apologetic goodbye-forever telegram to his employer, and another to his family asking that they not wear black, then a further telegram to his employer saying that, in fact, he would be returning—that he hadn’t meant to be dramatic or like an Ibsen heroine, and that he would explain it all on his return, a return that never occurred. The book J was reading had been written in the nineteen-seventies by a Sicilian novelist who was famous, apparently, and had most often written about the Mafia. J looked over to the sofa where Q had lain down, but she could see only the sofa’s back. For a moment, J felt certain that Q was gone. J walked over to the sofa; Q was there. J’s father had married Q two years after J’s mother died. J couldn’t really remember her mother, though she had one vivid and most likely fabricated-from-a-photo memory of eating a frosted doughnut with sprinkles with her at a Winchell’s, when she was three or maybe four. J still loved doughnuts; Q had bought them for her every weekend morning. J and her sister were both blond and blue-eyed, and Q had often been mistaken for the girls’ nanny. “Let people think their thinks” was a Q motto. When J’s father had died, three years earlier, he’d left Q a house and a teachers’-union pension fund that must have been worth something. Q had sold the house—not that she told the girls that she had done this—and moved into a small but tidy apartment. Q still worked part time only, as a backup receptionist at a law firm, so there must have been some money left over, but it seemed possible that the bulk of it had been lost. Or, maybe, anxiously piled high in a savings account somewhere that she wouldn’t touch. Or maybe loaned out irretrievably to distant Burmese cousins with unfortunate or naïve investment strategies. That kind of thing had happened before with Q. When the sisters recently visited Q, she’d announced on the first evening that she had stopped ordering takeout, because it was for spoiled people. Maybe Q had bought the Groupon shares after all? And on margin? You never knew with Q. One day, J had idly opened Q’s passport, and it turned out that Q was eleven years older than she had been letting on for all those years. “Where did all the big things with food go?”Buy the print » “Your sister tells me Q has been staying at Morris’s place,” J’s husband said. This was on the phone, around five o’clock, when J had stepped out to look for a lemonade she never found. Key West was humid and sleepy and closed. “Staying there while Morris is in the I.C.U., with some sort of bad pneumonia.” Morris was a retired accountant who had been in the same community choir as Q. “She’s probably just keeping the place airy and clean. Collecting the newspaper.” “Maybe. Or maybe she doesn’t have her own place anymore.” “Illusion of trouble,” J said, cheered that the conversation was moving her to the square of reason, since her husband had made a knight’s move to the square of paranoia. As they talked, J found herself picturing their steep driveway, the cleavages of snow, a pile of the neighbor’s discarded shingles waiting for pickup. And then it was “I love you, angel, I love you so much, O.K.?” J felt scared. They were getting off the phone. One was supposed to be content and complete on one’s own, to need nothing, and from that position one could truly give love—something like that. When J returned to the room, Q said, “I think I won’t come to the dinner.” “Why not?” J asked, alarmed. “Maybe you don’t want me there,” Q said. “But I do. It’s a bunch of people I’m supposed to be collegial with, which is stressful. I don’t want to go alone,” J said, mostly truthfully. “But I should lose weight,” Q said. “I shouldn’t go until I lose weight.” “You look nice. Plus, you don’t even know these people.” “Even more so.” “The people who are thinner than you will be happy to feel relatively thin; the people who are larger—well, they’ll be thinking about themselves. Actually, most everyone will be thinking about themselves. You taught me that. Now I finally believe you. Just come. I suspect the food will be good.” The dinner was held in a large Art Deco home that J couldn’t help but estimate as being worth around $2.2 million. Greeters—professionals wearing tidy black-and-white outfits—were in place at the entrance to an inner courtyard, and, in addition to greeting, they were warning guests that the house had many “tripping hazards.” “Please be careful. There are a lot of steps that you might not notice,” one of the greeters clarified. “We’ve marked them with red tape.” It was true: there was a step down to the living room. A step up to the dining room. A couple of steps down to the porch. Steps back up to other rooms. Everything had its level. The back yard, which featured an artificial stream, crossable by a small footbridge, had tables set up for about a hundred guests, maybe more. The party was already crowded when J and Q arrived. Was Twitter like the ancient Arcades or was it the end of literature? someone was asking. Someone else was explaining that his younger brother, after their bohemian upbringing in the Oregon woods and then having lived for years on boats, had run off with an evangelical musical-theatre project called Up with People. Reverse rebellion. What could you do? J didn’t manage to start up a conversation with anyone. She saw Q speaking with the hostess, with some intensity; M was also there, listening. Q was holding a drink. She looked as if she was enjoying herself. The hostess was wearing an aquamarine leather jacket that had slashes in the back, exposing an underlying black leather in a way that made J think of deboning a fish. The meal was grilled salmon on a quinoa salad, and also greens. At the table: “It’s so good to have a break,” Q said to a prominent science-fiction writer sitting near her. “Too many of my friends are sick or in the hospital.” “In the hospital for what?” a well-regarded older feminist who knew a lot about birds asked. “Who’s in the hospital?” M asked. Q seemed to have the attention of the whole table. “My friend was driving to the airport,” Q said. “He was going to fly to the Philippines and then he couldn’t turn his head, so he drove straight to the emergency room of the nearest hospital. Of course, they just left him on a stretcher in the hallway for two days. They wouldn’t have cared if he died—they did nothing for him. That’s America for you. But then his friend arranged a transfer to another hospital. And at the second hospital they scanned him, and they found he had a big tumor in his neck. Also, he was missing one of his, I can’t think of the word—” “You write about medicine?” “No, no, I just write e-mails,” Q said. “I’m not a writer. But I was married to J’s father—that’s how I’m connected to J. J says I write very good e-mails.” “I woke up with my neck sore like that once,” another science-fiction writer said. In addition to writing, he was in a band that had a hit song based on Beowulf. “I didn’t go to the hospital, though. I just took ibuprofen.” “But you could have gone to the hospital,” Q said. “Because you all have insurance in England. The whole country is insured.” Now J was worried that Q didn’t have health insurance; this was how her secrets usually manifested, like a tuba sound straying into a pop song. J intervened. “It wasn’t just painful to move his neck. I think he really couldn’t move it,” she argued, as if Q were beleaguered, when in fact she seemed aglow. Also, J was just guessing at these details; she didn’t know who Q was talking about. “They have names like C2, C3,” Q was explaining. “One of those C’s—he was missing it entirely.” “It had eroded away?” M asked. “No, they just didn’t know where it had gone,” Q said. “I think maybe it was never there.” “I visited him after he had the surgery,” Q went on. “They didn’t remove the tumor, because it was in a bad place for removing it, but they did give him an extra C made out of concrete—” “I doubt it was concrete.” “When I left to come down here, he was still in the hospital, because he was afraid to go home until he had the results from the biopsy. But I think he’ll be fine. They scanned the rest of his body and found tumors in other places, too, which is a good sign—” “That sounds like a bad sign,” the woman knowledgeable about birds said. “It’s not a bad sign,” Q said definitively. “I have a friend who’s a doctor.” Now Q seemed not aglow; she began to speak more slowly. “She says that, after a certain age, if we look at anyone’s body there’s all sorts of things there. When there’s many things like that, it’s not a problem.” “Incidentalomas,” M said. “That’s what you’re trying to say. That lots of things are just incidentalomas. I agree completely.” “Has anyone seen that George Clooney movie that’s playing?” J said. She ate quickly. J and Q weren’t the very first to leave, but they were almost the first, though they were detained near one of the tripping hazards as a very elderly and apparently blind man, dressed in an all-white suit and holding a cane, was being guided out by the greeters. As he was passing, J asked, “Q, is there something medical going on with you?” “I’m livelier than you are,” Q said. “I could stay another hour, easy.” “I mean, do you have medical news?” “You should be more cheerful,” Q said. “It would be good for your health. You know, that would be something good to write about. Staying in a good mood in order to have good health. You do that for thirty days and track what happens. That’s something that would really sell. I mean, I admire that you tell stories of make-believe people in worlds that don’t exist and that have no relevance to how we live. That can be nice, but people also like things that are uplifting, and practical.” The next day, they were out the door by 8:19 A.M. There were almost
 no obligations; it wasn’t until the following afternoon that J was expected to give a brief talk—on Martian dystopias—and later have an also brief conversation. Her only other duty was to enjoy. And there was even a small stipend. J and Q looked for somewhere to have breakfast. At the first café, omelettes were $13.95, which seemed a bit much. Not a lot much, but it just seemed unpleasant, and as if it would set expectations that the omelette would be quite good, which surely it wouldn’t be. It was already hot outside. At the next place, omelettes were $16.95. They went back to the first spot, where a window seat was available. “I feel skinny in this town,” Q said. “At least there’s that.” It was true: although the festival participants were relatively fit, the locals were relatively not fit. And a little flush in the face. Like alcoholics. Obviously they also had less money. One felt guilty noticing. Apparently, the locals were called Bubbas. Why did everyone, even J and Q, feel superior to the Bubbas? It was terrible. “And I think for a time, supposedly, this was a fashionable town,” J said. “Artists and gay people. Which are both groups that I think of as made up of mostly thin people. And maybe a few charismatically fat ones.” “It’s never charismatic to be fat,” Q said. “It can be, I think.” “No, never. And there are no children here, either,” Q observed. “That’s the other weird thing.” J, of course, had no children, not yet, anyhow. Neither did Q—no “natural” ones. “It’s very weird,” Q said, “to not have children. People who never have children are always still children, which, if you ask me, becomes disgusting. Even though children, of course, are sweet. I think the people who live here—I think they must have come here to run away from other things.” J had of late turned over in her mind the idea of having a baby that Q might move in to help raise; and maybe Q needed a place to stay? “How’s your friend Morris doing these days?” J asked. “I heard he was in the I.C.U.” “I think he’s better,” Q said. “To be honest, I didn’t like visiting him in the hospital. I really thought he was dead. It was unpleasant.” “Who’s taking care of his place while he’s in the hospital?” “Maybe his children? Though they’re very selfish. Morris said over three hundred people visited him while he was in the hospital. That’s because of his activity with the Toastmasters club.” The omelette was not that good, though it wasn’t bad. There was a newspaper. “Which part are you reading for?”Buy the print » “It says here that Gene Hackman was hit by a truck,” J said. “He lives here. He was on his bicycle, and he was hit. Not very far from here at all.” “Is he O.K.?” “It doesn’t say.” “Is he old?” “It says eighty-one.” “These days, that’s young. I bet he’ll turn out to be fine.” Why would he be fine? J thought. It was a truck. He was eighty-one. The physics was not promising. Twenty-four hours then passed in an extraordinarily slow blink. It was too hot to read or think or get hungry, and it wasn’t even that hot. One could walk around, but there wasn’t much territory to cover. The local graveyard was probably the prettiest thing in town. The graves were above ground, because the ground wasn’t really ground; it was hard coral that could not be dug up. The graveyard didn’t look all that much like a graveyard; it was more like an ambitious papier-mâché project that schoolchildren had put together. Except that there were no children. One saw lots of Margarita bars. There was a party for a ninety-five-year-old art collector—maybe the blind man in white?—who owned many things in town, but J and Q slept through it. Finally, it was the next afternoon, and J did an unusually bad job with her minimal obligations. “You should have just told some jokes or something,” Q said. “Everyone likes to laugh.” “I failed,” J said. “Sometimes failing is what’s needed. I think it can put people in a good mood, to see someone fail. Let people entertain themselves. I think that’s one of the reasons people are so lonely in this country. Because they always have to rush out and have someone else in the room entertain them. It’s terrible, the loneliness here. People live in coffins. Like Morris—if it weren’t for the Toastmasters, Morris would be in his coffin.” That evening, there was a double birthday celebration for two people named Norm. The Norms! Turning seventy-five and eighty-five. J and Q didn’t sleep through the party; they didn’t avoid it; they rode rented bicycles over to it. There were many loud-print shirts, and lots of alcohol. A woman with thick, long gray hair held back by a headband was wearing a high-waisted bright-yellow skirt and platform sandals. Among the snacks were bright-yellow peppers. The party was mostly outdoors, on a spacious deck between the main house and a guesthouse. Gentle lighting illuminated a small swimming pool. A little baobab tree grew through a hole in the deck. What might have been an anti-mosquito device had black-light properties, or, at least, there was a pale-blue Gatorade sort of drink that glowed in its aura, like new sneakers in a haunted house. J found herself in conversation with a woman whose mouth dragged left, perhaps from a stroke, or maybe it was just a thing. The woman was the host, it turned out. It was her house; one of the Norms was her husband—her husband who was younger than her. The other Norm was staying in host Norm’s guesthouse with his young lover, although apparently his young lover was, just for this week, staying elsewhere for half the time, because his even younger lover—“the chestnut,” a graduate student in French literature—was in town. J realized that the host was the woman who had written a book called “Real Humans,” which J had for years been pretending to have read; it was a seminal nine-hundred-plus-page post-apocalyptic book that imagined another way to live decently, ethically. On an island that it had been speculated was modelled on Tasmania; there were creatures like wallabies there. J commented on how nice the guesthouse looked. “Yes, we built that so our kids can stay there when they visit us. With their kids.” “That sounds smart,” J said. “Do you have kids?” the author of “Real Humans” asked. “I don’t,” J said. She looked J over. “Well, one day you will,” she said. “What you’ll find out then is that you don’t like to cook breakfast for them. People are weird with their breakfasts. They have very particular demands, and you’ll find that dealing with them can be very annoying.” “I can imagine,” J said. “You know what’s strange?” the woman asked. “O.K. What’s strange?” J wondered where Q was. “You’re going to go on living,” she said. “And I’m not going to go on living. I might go on for a while. I’m eighty-seven. But you’re going to continue into a future that I’m never going to see, and that I can’t even imagine. I mean, this cocktail party is just like one my parents might have thrown fifty years ago. But, in other ways, it’s a completely different world. I hear people on their cell phones saying, ‘Yes, I’m on the bus now. I’ll be there in ten minutes.’ Or, ‘I’m in the cereal aisle now.’ Well, that’s just so strange to me. I don’t find that normal. Do you find that normal? Do you do that tweeting? Do you understand those things? I know that I can’t follow. So I just don’t. But you’re just going forward into the future. You’ll go forward and forward, into it. And I won’t.” “I’m here with my mom,” J said. “I better go check in with my mom.” J couldn’t recall ever having used that phrase out loud. It sounded almost like science fiction. She couldn’t find her! Then she found her. Q was in conversation with M. And also with the lover of the other Norm, the guesthouse Norm. And also with a man who had lived for a long time on a boat. The man had lived on the boat when real estate in Key West was too expensive, he was explaining, but now he was back on the island again. Which had he liked more? Well, he liked both. Then the other Norm’s lover was explaining that, sure, Norm didn’t like to sleep alone when “the chestnut” was in town. Especially since his recent health scare. But one couldn’t be at the sugar-teat all the time, the lover was of the opinion. The other Norm was in sight, looking pretty happy, talking to some people near a fountain. The other Norm was a painter and a language poet, known to have been living in relative health and joy, and with numerous lovers, while H.I.V.-positive, for decades. J did feel a little spooked by the openness of it all. It had to be how it had to be, the lover was saying. And it helped keep things hot—there was that, too. The conversation went back to boats. Someone startled J with a tap on the shoulder. “Did you find your mom?” It was the “Real Humans” woman. J blushed. “Look,” the woman said. “I can see you’re disgusted by us.” “What?” J said. “I know about young people. They’re very conservative and very judgmental.” She had now opened up her speech to the whole group, but she was still clearly addressing J. “You think we’re all decayed and dying, which we are, of course, but you’re dying every day, too. You’ll just keep dying and dying. I know from my own children.” She took a sip from her little blue drink. “I mean, look at you. Quiet as a superior little mouse.” “Let me get you some water,” M said to the woman. “No, no,” she said. “I don’t need water. I’m just saying something about this young woman. She’s had her little bit of success. She’s thinking to herself, I’m not going to make the mistakes these people made. I’m going to keep my head down and work and not hurt anyone’s feelings too much and not get hurt myself. She thinks she’s solved it all with her preëmptive gloominess and her inoffensiveness.” “You should enjoy your party,” the man who had lived on a boat said. “There’s a subspecies of these young people,” the woman was saying. “They’re very careful. The young women especially; they’re the worst—” “You’re so right,” Q said. She took hold of Real Humans’ arm. “They are the worst. This one’s innocent enough, though.” “She’s a wily mouse, you don’t know. Do you have children?” she now asked Q. “They’re very judgmental. If you have children, you know.” “This one’s kind of my daughter.” She gave Q the once-over. “Yes, they’re all kind of our daughters, aren’t they?” “I wouldn’t take any of this too seriously,” Norm’s lover said to J. “She’s been starting arguments at parties for thirty years. Haven’t you?” “For fifty years,” Real Humans said. “Did you hear about Gene Hackman?” Q asked. “He doesn’t really live here,” Real Humans said. “He lives one island over. I heard he’s doing just fine.” “I feel kind of elated,” J said. “Sure you do,” Real Humans said. It was as if Q’s secret wasn’t that she’d lost her home, or lost her money, or was secretly ill, but that she actually knew what she was doing. Or maybe she had lost her money and her home, and maybe she was ill, but she was able to handle it. All these partygoers seemed able to handle their lives. “He was just scratched up a bit,” Norm’s lover said. “Who was scratched up?” “Gene Hackman. He wasn’t really hurt at all.” “That’s what I thought,” Q said. “I thought he would be fine.” Everyone admired Gene Hackman. “Hasn’t he had a sad life?” J asked. “I thought I’d been told that. That his mother died in a fire started by her own cigarette?” No, no, his life had worked out. He had a great life. He joined the Navy. He was a failure in acting school. When his old teacher saw him working as a doorman in New York, the teacher said he’d always known that he’d amount to nothing. He was retired from movies now. He had three kids. He had paired up with an underwater archeologist to write three adventure novels. Maybe four adventure novels. Or one was a Western, maybe. It was titled “Justice for None.”

The first night I stayed in Kilinochchi I was a little apprehensive. Most of us living in the south of Sri Lanka had come to think of this town as the nerve center of terror. As Mr. Wahid, my first Malaysian client, said, in English even the name sounded brutal—like the kind of town where you could imagine a Clint Eastwood character striding in and notching the stock of his rifle with yet another senseless killing. In reality, Kilinochchi had been the capital of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam for years. Here the Tigers had had their civic center, their secretariat, their press conferences. This was the place where Tiger stamps, L.T.T.E. travel passes, G.C.E. school-exam papers, land mines, and black-stripe grenades were issued. The Eelam bank was here, Swiss style, before it came to a swift end in the final stages of the civil war. This was the place the Tigers had then destroyed, toppling the water tower and blowing up the municipal buildings, before evacuating into the ever diminishing jungle as the Sri Lankan Army marched in, guns blazing, for the showdown of January, 2009. But now, two years later, I turned off the highway, teeming with road hogs and pot rodents, into the brand-new forecourt of the Spice Garden Inn, and it could have been the latest incarnation of the Colombo Hotel Corporation in full flutter: a northern cousin dolled up with colored flags, ribbons, and streamers. A glass-walled cafeteria shone, and the reception desk overflowed with coconut flowers and bougainvillea. The scent of wax polish, disinfectant, and karapincha leaves fried in sesame oil masked the lingering spoor of the vanished big cats. This hotel signalled the new era of the old town. Mrs. Arunachalam, who was seven months pregnant and spread across the middle seat of my taxi van, wanted to make the eleven-hour journey to Jaffna in small stages, like an ant on a sugar trail. She ought not to have been travelling at all, the way she sighed and swooned, but her husband was very keen to show her a property in Jaffna that he intended to buy and develop as their new family home, and so she had come. “Vasantha, can’t you go slowly around the bend, please?” she kept saying, in an infuriating refrain, from the moment we left Rajagiriya on her journey of a lifetime. “Yes, Madam,” I’d reply. Yes, yes, yes. I am already around the bleeding bend. When she saw the flags and streamers, she was jubilant. “That’s the place. That’s the place we booked for the night, Kollu. Isn’t it pretty?” Her husband leaned forward. “That’s right. You’ll be able to rest very quietly here.” Within half an hour, they had tucked into the best part of a pot of chicken curry and gone to their room upstairs to gently burp and gurgle their prenatal intimacies. By the time I got to the cafeteria, it was empty, except for the creepy-crawlies on the wall and one sulky waiter massaging his neck. “Dinner put.” He pointed at the curry pot and the basin of boiled rice. He was more suited to the job of a traffic policeman, one of the automaton types we used to have before we modernized into a mania for red-amber-green multispots. I took a plate and helped myself to the last bits of scraggly chicken bone and a couple of spoonfuls of rice. I’ve had worse, but not much worse. One of the things you notice when you drive up and down the country is the variation that’s possible in something as simple as boiled rice. Sometimes it feels as if you were eating pebbles; other times it’s like cotton. At the Spice Garden Inn, the rice was definitely on the rocky side. But after the war and the wall-to-wall fighting in the town, it was hardly surprising that even rice would turn to rubble. The thought of what might have been done with bullets and mortars in this very spot chastened me. I needed a beer. I asked the waiter for one, wondering idly what kind they’d have: imported Tiger beer? He disappeared into the back. When he returned, he had a tall, dark bottle of Three Coins on a metal tray and a young woman in a gray trouser suit in tow. Halfway across the room, she overtook him, pushing a metal chair neatly out of the way and coming to a stop in front of my table. “Welcome.” She parted her lips in a smile, but barely a muscle moved beyond her mouth. Her eyes seemed to be calculating the exact dimensions of my head, neck, and chest. She noted the position of my hands and the state of my fingernails. “From Colombo?” I nodded. “Jaffna tour.” “This is the place to break the journey, then.” “That’s what they wanted. My party needs a lot of rest.” I patted my stomach as though I were the pregnant one. “Drivers must rest, also. Driving all day is too much, no?” I shrugged. Once you are in the driver’s seat, all that matters is keeping your eyes open. Maybe not all that matters, but the main thing. On these long empty roads going north, even the speed of your reflexes isn’t that important. We are no longer at war. “This is a nice place.” She looked at me now as if she were trying to tell whether I was being truthful. As if it mattered. “I am the assistant manager. Miss Saraswati. My job is to make this hotel very welcoming so that it becomes the regular stop for all tours going up to Jaffna.” She paused. “For breakfast, lunch, dinner, or overnight. We can do everything.” I had no doubt that she could. She seemed very capable, although she definitely needed a better cook. “Are you from a hotel school, then? Catering and management?” People who have made more informed choices in their lives than I have always impress me. “We had a lot of training.” She let the waiter put the tray down and pour half the bottle of beer into my glass. “We have to be able to cope with every situation. If we keep our focus, we can overcome problems. Any problem.” She had the severe look that some women have when they think their time is running out. I waited for the froth to subside. “Starting something like this up here must be difficult. E.T.s are pouring into the south like cement from a pipe now, but here it is still only locals, no?” “Cement?” She looked puzzled. “E.T.s?” “You could say like beer or water, but I was thinking of the new hotels being built and all the European tourists, even the Nordics, now happily sunning themselves on the beach.” As I spoke, it occurred to me that the picture I was painting was probably impossible to imagine in this dumping ground of bombs. I gulped down some beer and poured the rest of the bottle into the glass, realizing too late that, out of courtesy, I should have offered her some. “Are you from Kilinochchi?” “Nearby.” She tipped her head. “I went to Jaffna and then came here.” “College?” I asked admiringly. “Something like that.” “Because of the—” “Yes.” The word was quick and oddly unerring. Not only did she have poise and determination but she seemed tightly strung, like one of those ballerinas performing with the Bolshoi on TV. Every look, every movement bound to a larger purpose. The Spice Garden Inn was lucky to have her: it surely would not fail with her in place. The waiter, who had moved to the back of the room, started. “Rat,” he yelped. Miss Saraswati spun around. A big brown rodent was scurrying across the floor toward the tallboy in the far corner. She hissed loudly and sharply, and it froze for a moment. As it began to edge forward again, she grasped my beer bottle by the neck and flung it. The bottle hit the rat with such force that the creature thudded against the wall. The bottle rolled along, unbroken. Its base had smashed the animal’s small skull. “Burn it,” she instructed the waiter. “Use a plastic bag. Wash your hands afterward.” She turned to me. “Sorry about that. I’ll bring you another bottle.” I stared at Miss Saraswati. “You learn to do that at Jaffna hotel school?” While she went to get another beer, I sat and gazed at my plate of food. I don’t mind rats, or the killing of them; I was just a little stunned by her action. The accuracy with which she had thrown the bottle was extraordinary. When she returned, her polite smile was back in place. “Sorry,” she said again and placed the new bottle in front of me. She sat down. “Please eat.” I pushed my plate away. “What? No appetite now? Don’t worry. It’s dead, no?” “I ate.” “They are all over the town, but we do not allow them here. I believe it is not good for guests to see.” “Yes, true. Guests can get upset very easily.” “Usually the dogs keep the rats away.” “Dogs are good. Yes.” I had a dog once, a small terrier. It had belonged to a Danish man I worked for in Colombo. When he was posted to Laos, he decided that he couldn’t take the little fellow with him. I offered to look after the dog, and when I told him that I lived in a house with a small garden he let me. But about a year later the dog died. It shot out of the gate one day and was hit by a minister’s sidekick in one of those high-speed V.I.P. cavalcades on the main road. This happened a long time ago—it was not the fault of the current government—and I wouldn’t have told her about it if she hadn’t asked. She nodded, as though small killings were a natural part of politics as well as of hotel management. She pulled out one of the two paper serviettes from the chrome clip on the table and smoothed it like a mini funeral shroud. “You have to bury the dead and move on.” “Bury or burn?” “That doesn’t matter. What matters is what you carry inside.” Her mouth tightened with what I thought was a hint of hurt or anger. She wasn’t talking about rats or dogs. I like to know about the world beyond our shores. About faraway countries where people behave differently. I like to hear about their food and customs. How they deal with the cold and the rain. What it’s like to drive on the other side of the road. I like to take foreign tourists around because it gives me a glimpse of a place that is different in touch, taste, smell, sound, and look from the place I am stuck in. I watch how they sit, how they walk, how they talk, and I try to see what they want to escape from and then return to. They are not all driven only by a desire for sex in new places. Some want to know about our history and our culture and what makes us live the way we do. So do I. Sometimes I don’t know how we manage. We know so little, and the little we do know we get so muddled. Miss Saraswati intrigued me. She seemed to come from some other place: not Kilinochchi, not a Jaffna college, not anywhere nearby but somewhere dark and hungry and deep. Somewhere beyond the blackness at the end of the garden, where even the moonlight shrank back. Of course, I was not her guide; she was really mine, so the sock was on the wrong foot, if you know what I mean. But, still, I wanted to know about her. “Your family? Are they here?” That might give me a place to start, I thought. “Have you come to these parts before, Mr. Van Driver?” “Vasantha,” I said, and added, “I have driven up to Jaffna a few times now.” “Then you must know that it is best not to ask about families. It is best not to ask about someone’s brother or father or mother or sister.” “Why?” She looked at me as if I were a lost cause. “After a war, it is best not to ask about the past.” That is not true, I thought. After such a calamity, surely one should? How else will we know what really happened? And if we don’t know, will it not be repeated? At any rate, we should not let war or half-baked political decrees pervert our native habits of curiosity and easy engagement. But I didn’t say any of this. She did not seem in as conversational a mood as she had earlier, and even then she had hovered in some in-between place. Hospitality training, I imagine, helps you to mask your feelings with a smile and to polish that façade of pleasant well-being that Sri Lankans, our foreign visitors tell me, are so good at putting on. But in Miss Saraswati’s case the training was incomplete. She was not a natural. She could mask, but she couldn’t do the other thing. She had been named after the goddess of learning, but she seemed to believe that ignorance was bliss. When she turned toward the door, I noticed a thick scar where the skin had crumpled at the base of her neck. When she turned back, it slid under her collar and was hidden again. In my room in the drivers’ quarters I sat with the door open. Some oil sticks had been lit along the veranda to ward off the mosquitoes. The only sound was the hum of the fluorescent tube farther along. Whenever I drive foreign visitors at night, out in the country, they always comment on how dark it is. I used to think, How could it be otherwise? But, having been told this so many times, I have begun to see things through their eyes, and for me, too, night outside Colombo now feels very dark. The blackness is like ink seeping through my eyes and into my head. What is happening inside me is no different from what is going on outside. That leads me to thoughts about death, which are pointless and help no one. The difficulty, then, is to think of something else. Sex, the antidote you grasp for in youth, is less engaging when you are cloistered in a driver’s room in the middle of nowhere; and politics, the other base impulse, is a bit of a nightmare these days. Crime—I mean stories about crime, not crime itself—works best, and I especially like crime stories that come from England or America. Bollywood has the edge on musicals, but Pinewood and Hollywood have cornered the criminal stuff. So a pirated DVD is a good solution, if you have the right gadget. I’ve been thinking about getting one of those portable players; I just need a few big tips to get me into a spending position. But that night, in the inky blackness in Kilinochchi, all these other things began to merge together: politics, history, even sex, in the form of Miss Saraswati, where it was bound up with mutilation and death. We all have a private past, a store of thoughts, feelings, sensations, disappointments that nobody else will ever unearth. That’s just life. But in Miss Saraswati’s case, it seemed to me, there was something more deliberately hidden. Areas cordoned off. I suppose it was only natural. So much is kept off limits these days. There are things we don’t speak of, things we not only don’t remember but carefully forget, places we do not stray into, memories we bury or reshape. That is the way we live nowadays: driving along a road between hallucination and amnesia. As long as you are moving, you are O.K.—you have negotiated safe passage, for the moment. It is only when you come to a stop like this, in a black night in the middle of nowhere, that things wobble a bit and you wonder about the purpose of roads. You sit in the dark, frightened at the life you’ve led and the things you’ve left undone. You can only hope that in the long run it won’t matter, but that in itself is no consolation at all. The staff quarters of the Spice Garden Inn, or at least the drivers’ rooms, had been built by a benevolent but misguided despot. The essentials were there: bed, table, chair, window, coir mat, electric light. The walls were painted. Yellow in my room, green next door. And yet there was something prisonlike in the air. The rooms had been designed by a person who would never stay in them himself, or perhaps herself. Each element was inoffensive, so it was difficult to say what the flaws were. All I knew was the difference I could feel between comfort and discomfort. The ideal and the disillusioning reality. From what I’ve heard, living in the U.S.S.R. before perestroika was like that. You knew something was wrong, but you didn’t know how to make it right. I stepped outside for a cigarette. I’m not much of a smoker, but there are times when I have the urge to fill my lungs with poison. If the damage is there, I want to invite it in. Make it mine so that I can do something with it. Everywhere the edges blurred. I walked along the veranda on a narrow path between light and dark, then out into the garden, where I thought the darkness would consume me, but a tiny glimmer of light from the sky seemed to spread into a silvery web. And when I lit my cigarette there was more to contend with. After one or two drags, I put it out and waited. Then I saw her. She was on the main balcony of the hotel, a silhouette darker than the darkness, but unmistakably her. Looking out at the fields, like the guardian of an unquenchable dream. She slowly uncrossed her arms and bent down. When she straightened up again, she had something in her hand. It looked like a revolver, but when she clicked the catch a beam of light shot out. She ran it along the fence at the end of the garden and did a sweep around the pond. She caught the eyes of an animal and held the light on it for a few seconds, the beam as steady as a military searchlight. Then she switched it off, leaving the night darker than ever. In the morning, I went and ate some bread and sambol, and waited for the Arunachalams to appear. I took a refill of tea that was a travesty, even by the standards of the previous night’s dinner, and sat on one of the garden chairs, from which I could see the breakfast room. I wondered how long Miss Saraswati had kept watch from the balcony and when she would resume her office duties. I heard Mrs. Arunachalam before I saw her. She was complaining about her husband’s snoring, although I would have guessed that the reality of the bedroom situation was the reverse. Mr. Arunachalam said nothing in return. I thought of alerting him to the virtues of the sound-blocking headphones that many of my recent foreign clients sported. They heard nothing that they had not programmed themselves to hear and managed to avoid any pollution of their inner world with the din of local color. It was an admirable survival technique in a noisy world. Pollution is, after all, the world’s biggest problem. Even in Malaysia, people apparently suffer from it. The couple took a table on the veranda. “I would like ham and eggs and toast. You think they have ham here?” Mrs. Arunachalam scraped her chair forward. “What about a thosai? Better, no?” “But I have this craving. And no sleep even, not with you and your trumpeting.” Miss Saraswati appeared between them and said something I couldn’t hear. She seemed to manage to placate Mrs. Arunachalam without recourse to pork. When they had finished breakfast and gone upstairs to pack their toothbrushes and tweezers, or whatever, Miss Saraswati came out to me. “You are a peacemaker as well,” I said. “We do whatever it takes.” She gave me a card. “Bring all your tours here. We can cater for everyone.” “I can see that,” I said. “Terrific training, your catering college.” She put her hands together and lowered her head. This time, her collar was tightly buttoned and revealed nothing, but I noticed that the trigger finger of her right hand was callused and discolored at the edge. Then Mrs. Arunachalam called me. “Driver, come here. Can you put this bag on the seat in there? I need it right next to me. And put the A.C. on before we get in, so it will be nice and cool for a change. I can’t be getting hot again.” Miss Saraswati looked at me. I wanted her to smile, even that put-on smile, but her face was blank. Her black eyes gave nothing away. I wished for a moment that I knew what she was thinking, and then I was glad that I didn’t. There comes a point when you don’t want to know.

It was a brand of imposition of which young people like Liana thought nothing: showing up on an older couple’s doorstep, the home of friends of friends of friends, playing on a tentative enough connection that she’d have had difficulty constructing the sequence of referrals. If there was anything to that six-degrees-of-separation folderol, she must have been equally related to the entire population of the continent. Typically, she’d given short notice, first announcing her intention to visit in a voice mail only a few days before bumming a ride with another party she hardly knew. (Well, the group had spent a long, hard-drinking night in Nairobi at a sprawling house with mangy dead animals on the walls that the guy with the ponytail was caretaking. In this footloose crowd of journalists and foreign-aid workers between famines, trust-fund layabouts, and tourists who didn’t think of themselves as tourists, if only because they never did anything, the evening qualified them all as fast friends.) Ponytail Guy was driving to Malindi, on the Kenyan coast, for an expat bash that sounded a little druggie for Liana’s Midwestern tastes. But the last available seat in his Land Rover would take her a stone’s throw from this purportedly more-the-merrier couple and their gorgeously situated crash pad. It was nice of the guy to divert to Kilifi to drop her off, but then Liana was attractive, and knew it. Mature adulthood—and the experience of being imposed upon herself—might have encouraged her to consider what showing up as an uninvited, impecunious house guest would require of her hosts. Though Liana imagined herself undemanding, even the easy to please required fresh sheets, which would have to be laundered after her departure, then dried and folded. She would require a towel for swimming, a second for her shower. She would expect dinner, replete with discreet refreshments of her wineglass, strong filtered coffee every morning, and—what cost older people more than a sponger in her early twenties realized—steady conversational energy channelled in her direction for the duration of her stay. For her part, Liana always repaid such hospitality with brightness and enthusiasm. On arrival at the Henleys’ airy, weathered wooden house nestled in the coastal woods, she made a point of admiring soapstone knickknacks, cooing over framed black-and-whites of Masai initiation ceremonies, and telling comical tales about the European riffraff she’d met in Nairobi. Her effervescence came naturally. She would never have characterized it as an effort, until—and unless—she grew older herself. While she’d have been reluctant to form the vain conceit outright, it was perhaps tempting to regard the sheer insertion of her physical presence as a gift, one akin to showing up at the door with roses. Supposedly a world-famous photographer, Regent Henley carried herself as if she used to be a looker, but she’d let her long dry hair go gray. Her crusty husband, Beano (the handle may have worked when he was a boy, but now that he was over sixty it sounded absurd), could probably use a little eye candy twitching onto their screened-in porch for sundowners: some narrow hips wrapped tightly in a fresh kikoi, long wet hair slicked back from a tanned, exertion-flushed face after a shower. Had Liana needed further rationalization of her amiable freeloading, she might also have reasoned that in Kenya every white household was overrun with underemployed servants. Not Regent and Beano but their African help would knot the mosquito netting over the guest bed. So Liana’s impromptu visit would provide the domestics with something to do, helping to justify the fact that bwana paid their children’s school fees. But Liana thought none of these things. She thought only that this was another opportunity for adventure on the cheap, and at that time economy trumped all other considerations. Not because she was rude, or prone to take advantage by nature. She was merely young. A perfectly pleasant girl on her first big excursion abroad, she would doubtless grow into a better-socialized woman who would make exorbitant hotel reservations rather than dream of dumping herself on total strangers. Yet midway through this casual mooching off the teeny-tiny-bit-pretentious photographer and her retired safari-guide husband (who likewise seemed rather self-impressed, considering that Liana had already run into a dozen masters of the savanna just like him), Liana entered one eerily elongated window during which her eventual capacity to make sterner judgments of her youthful impositions from the perspective of a more worldly adulthood became imperilled. A window after which there might be no woman. There might only, ever, have been a girl—remembered, guiltily, uneasily, resentfully, by her aging, unwilling hosts more often than they would have preferred. Day Four. She was staying only six nights—an eyeblink for a twenty-three-year-old, a “bloody long time” for the Brit who had groused to his wife under-breath about putting up “another dewy-eyed Yank who confuses a flight to Africa with a trip to the zoo.” Innocent of Beano’s less-than-charmed characterizations, Liana had already established a routine. Mornings were consumed with texting friends back in Milwaukee about her exotic situation, with regular refills of passion-fruit juice. After lunch, she’d pile into the jeep with Regent to head to town for supplies, after tolerating the photographer’s ritual admonishment that Kilifi was heavily Muslim and it would be prudent to “cover up.” (Afternoons were hot. Even her muscle T clung uncomfortably, and Liana considered it a concession not to strip down to her running bra. She wasn’t about to drag on long pants to pander to a bunch of uptight foreigners she’d never see again; career expats like Regent were forever showing off how they’re hip to local customs and you’re not.) She never proffered a few hundred shillings to contribute to the grocery bill, not because she was cheap—though she was; at her age, that went without saying—but because the gesture never occurred to her. Back “home,” she would mobilize for a long, vigorous swim in Kilifi Creek, where she would work up an appetite for dinner. As she sidled around the house in her bikini—gulping more passion-fruit juice at the counter, grabbing a fresh towel—her exhibitionism was unconscious; call it instinctive, suggesting an inborn feel for barter. She lingered with Beano, inquiring about the biggest animal he’d ever shot, then commiserating about ivory poaching (always a crowd-pleaser) as she bound back her long blond hair, now bleached almost white. Raised arms made her stomach look flatter. Turning with a “cheerio!” that she’d picked up in Nairobi, Liana sashayed out the back porch and down the splintered wooden steps before cursing herself, because she should have worn flip-flops. Returning for shoes would ruin her exit, so she picked her way carefully down the overgrown dirt track to the beach in bare feet. In Wisconsin, a “creek” was a shallow, burbling dribble with tadpoles that purled over rocks. Where Liana was from, you wouldn’t go for a serious swim in a “creek.” You’d splash up to your ankles while cupping your arches over mossy stones, arms extended for balance, though you almost always fell in. But everything in Africa was bigger. Emptying into the Indian Ocean, Kilifi Creek was a river—an impressively wide river at that—which opened into a giant lake sort of thing when she swam to the left and under the bridge. This time, in the interest of variety, she would strike out to the right. The water was cold. Yipping at every advance, Liana struggled out to the depth of her upper thighs, gingerly avoiding sharp rocks. Regent and Beano may have referred to the shoreline as a “beach,” but there wasn’t a grain of sand in sight, and with all the green gunk along the bank the obstacles were hard to spot. Chiding herself not to be a wimp, she plunged forward. This was a familiar ritual of her childhood trips to Lake Winnebago: the shriek of inhalation, the hyperventilation, the panicked splashing to get the blood running, the soft surprise of how quickly the water feels warm. Liana considered herself a strong swimmer, of a kind. That is, she’d never been comfortable with the gasping and thrashing of the crawl, which felt frenetic. But she was a virtuoso of the sidestroke, with a powerful scissor kick whose thrust carried her faster than many swimmers with inefficient crawls (much to their annoyance, as she’d verified in her college pool). The sidestroke was contemplative. Its rhythm was ideally calibrated for a breath on every other kick, and resting only one cheek in the water allowed her to look around. It was less rigorous than the butterfly but not as geriatric as the breaststroke, and after long enough you still got tired—marvellously so. Pulling out far enough from the riverbank so that she shouldn’t have to worry about hitting rocks with that scissor kick, Liana rounded to the right and rapidly hit her stride. The late-afternoon light had just begun to mellow. The shores were forested, with richly shaded inlets and copses. She didn’t know the names of the trees, but now that she was alone, with no one trying to make her feel ignorant about a continent of which white people tended to be curiously possessive, she didn’t care if those were acacias or junipers. They were green: good enough. Though Kilifi was renowned as a resort area for high-end tourists, and secreted any number of capacious houses like her hosts’, the canopy hid them well. It looked like wilderness: good enough. Gloriously, Liana didn’t have to watch out for the powerboats and Jet Skis that terrorized Lake Winnebago, and she was the only swimmer in sight. Africans, she’d been told (lord, how much she’d been told; every backpacker three days out of Jomo Kenyatta airport was an expert), didn’t swim. Not only was the affluent safari set too lazy to get in the water; by this late in the afternoon they were already drunk. This was the best part of the day. No more enthusiastic chatter about Regent’s latest work. For heaven’s sake, you’d think she might have finally discovered color photography at this late date. Blazing with yellow flora, red earth, and, at least outside Nairobi, unsullied azure sky, Africa was wasted on the woman. All she photographed was dust and poor people. It was a relief, too, not to have to seem fascinated as Beano lamented the unsustainable growth of the human population and the demise of Kenyan game, all the while having to pretend that she hadn’t heard variations on this same dirge dozens of times in a mere three weeks. Though she did hope that, before she hopped a ride back to Nairobi with Ponytail Guy, the couple would opt for a repeat of that antelope steak from the first night. The meat had been lean; rare in both senses of the word, it gave good text the next morning. There wasn’t much point in going all the way to Africa and then sitting around eating another hamburger. “They have no military, sire—no one’s ever made it past their receptionist.”Buy the print » Liana paused her reverie to check her position, and sure enough she’d drifted farther from the shore than was probably wise. She knew from the lake swims of childhood vacations that distance over water was hard to judge. If anything, the shore was farther away than it looked. So she pulled heavily to the right, and was struck by how long it took to make the trees appear appreciably larger. Just when she’d determined that land was within safe reach, she gave one more stiff kick, and her right foot struck rock. The pain was sharp. Liana hated interrupting a swim, and she didn’t have much time before the equatorial sun set, as if someone had flicked a light switch. Nevertheless, she dropped her feet and discovered that this section of the creek was barely a foot and a half deep. No wonder she’d hit a rock. Sloshing to a sun-warmed outcrop, she examined the top of her foot, which began to gush blood as soon as she lifted it out of the water. There was a flap. Something of a mess. Even if she headed straight back to the Henleys’, all she could see was thicket—no path, much less a road. The only way to return and put some kind of dressing on this stupid thing was to swim. As she stumbled through the shallows, her foot smarted. Yet, bathed in the cool water, it quickly grew numb. Once she had slogged in deep enough to resume her sidestroke, Liana reasoned, Big deal, I cut my foot. The water would keep the laceration clean; the chill would stanch the bleeding. It didn’t really hurt much now, and the only decision was whether to cut the swim short. The silence pierced by tropical birdcalls was a relief, and Liana didn’t feel like showing up back at the house with too much time to kill with enraptured blah-blah before dinner. She’d promised herself that she’d swim at least a mile, and she couldn’t have done more than a quarter. So Liana continued to the right, making damned sure to swim out far enough so that she was in no danger of hitting another rock. Still, the cut had left her rattled. Her idyll had been violated. No longer gentle and welcoming, the shoreline shadows undulated with a hint of menace. The creek had bitten her. Having grown fitful, the sidestroke had transformed from luxury to chore. Possibly she’d tightened up from a queer encroaching fearfulness, or perhaps she was suffering from a trace of shock—unless, that is, the water had genuinely got colder. Once in a while she felt a flitter against her foot, like a fish, but it wasn’t a fish. It was the flap. Kind of creepy. Liana resigned herself: this expedition was no longer fun. The light had taken a turn from golden to vermillion—a modulation she’d have found transfixing if only she were on dry land—and she still had to swim all the way back. Churning a short length farther to satisfy pride, she turned around. And got nowhere. Stroking at full power, Liana could swear she was going backward. As long as she’d been swimming roughly in the same direction, the current hadn’t been noticeable. This was a creek, right? But an African creek. As for her having failed to detect the violent surge running at a forty-five-degree angle to the shoreline, an aphorism must have applied—something about never being aware of forces that are on your side until you defy them. Liana made another assessment of her position. Her best guess was that the shore had drifted farther away again. Very much farther. The current had been pulling her out while she’d been dithering about the fish-flutter flap of her foot. Which was now the least of her problems. Because the shore was not only distant. It stopped. Beyond the end of the land was nothing but water. Indian Ocean water. If she did not get out of the grip of the current, it would sweep her past that last little nub of the continent and out to sea. Suddenly the dearth of boats, Jet Skis, fellow-swimmers, and visible residents or tourists, drunken or not, seemed far less glorious. The sensation that descended was calm, determined, and quiet, though it was underwritten by a suppressed hysteria that it was not in her interest to indulge. Had she concentration to spare, she might have worked out that this whole emotional package was one of her first true tastes of adulthood: what happens when you realize that a great deal, or even everything, is at stake and that no one is going to help you. It was a feeling that some children probably did experience but shouldn’t. At least solitude discouraged theatrics. She had no audience to panic for. No one to exclaim to, no one to whom she might bemoan her quandary. It was all do, no say. Swimming directly against the current had proved fruitless. Instead, Liana angled sharply toward the shore, so that she was cutting across the current. Though she was still pointed backward, in the direction of Regent and Beano’s place, this riptide would keep dragging her body to the left. Had she known her exact speed, and the exact rate at which the current was carrying her in the direction of the Indian Ocean, she would have been able to answer the question of whether she was about to die by solving a simple geometry problem: a point travels at a set speed at a set angle toward a line of a set length while moving at a set speed to the left. Either it will intersect the line or it will miss the line and keep travelling into wide open space. Liquid space, in this case. Of course, she wasn’t in possession of these variables. So she swam as hard and as steadily as she knew how. There was little likelihood that suddenly adopting the crawl, at which she’d never been any good, would improve her chances, so the sidestroke it would remain. She trained her eyes on a distinctive rock formation as a navigational guide. Thinking about her foot wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about how exhausted she was wouldn’t help, so she did not. Thinking about never having been all that proficient at geometry was hardly an assist, either, so she proceeded in a state of dumb animal optimism. The last of the sun glinted through the trees and winked out. Technically, the residual threads of pink and gray in the early-evening sky were very pretty. “Where is that blooming girl?” Beano said, and threw one of the leopard-print cushions onto the sofa. “She should have been back two hours ago. It’s dark. It’s Africa, she’s a baby, she knows absolutely nothing, and it’s dark.” “Maybe she met someone, went for a drink,” Regent said. “Our fetching little interloper’s meeting someone is exactly what I’m afraid of. And how’s she to go to town with some local rapist in only a bikini?” “You would remember the bikini,” Regent said, dryly. “Damned if I understand why all these people rock up and suddenly they’re our problem.” “I don’t like it any more than you do, but if she floats off into the night air never to be seen again she is our problem. Maybe someone picked her up in a boat. Carried her round the southern bend to one of the resorts.” “She’ll not have her phone on a swim, so she’s no means of giving us a shout if she’s in trouble. She’ll not have her wallet, either—if she even has one. Never so much as volunteers a bottle of wine, while hoovering up my best Cabernet like there’s no tomorrow.” “If anything has happened, you’ll regret having said that sort of thing.” “Might as well gripe while I still can, then. You know, I don’t even know the girl’s surname? Much less who to ring if she’s vanished. I can see it: having to comb through her kit, search out her passport. Bringing in the sodding police, who’ll expect chai just for answering the phone. No good ever comes from involving those thieving idiots in your life, and then there’ll be a manhunt. Thrashing the bush, prodding the shallows. And you know how the locals thrive on a mystery, especially when it involves a young lady—” “They’re bored. We’re all bored. Which is why you’re letting your imagination run away with you. It’s not that late yet. I’m sure there’s a simple explanation.” “I’m not bored, I’m hungry. Aziza probably started dinner at four—since she is bored—and you can bet it’s muck by now.” Regent fetched a bowl of fried-chickpea snacks, but despite Beano’s claims of an appetite he left them untouched. “Christ, I can see the whole thing,” he said, pacing. “It’ll turn into one of those cases. With the parents flying out and grilling all the servants and having meetings with the police. Expecting to stay here, of course, tearing hair and getting emotional while we urge them to please do eat some lunch. Going on tirades about how the local law enforcement is ineffectual and corrupt, and bringing in the F.B.I. Telling childhood anecdotes about their darling and expecting us to get tearful with them over the disappearance of some, I concede, quite agreeable twenty-something, but still a girl we’d barely met.” “You like her,” Regent said. “You’re just ranting because you’re anxious.” “She has a certain intrepid quality, which may be deadly, but which until it’s frightened out of her I rather admire,” he begrudged, then resumed the rant. “Oh, and there’ll be media. CNN and that. You know the Americans—they love innocent-abroad stories. But you’d think they’d learn their lesson. It beats me why their families keep letting kids holiday in Africa as if the whole world is a happy-clappy theme park. With all those carjackings on the coast road—” “Ordinarily I’d agree with you, but there’s nothing especially African about going for a swim in a creek. She’s done it every other afternoon, so I’ve assumed she’s a passable swimmer. Do you think—would it help if we got a torch and went down to the dock? We could flash it about, shout her name out. She might just be lost.” “My throat hurts just thinking about it.” Still, Beano was heading to the entryway for his jacket when the back-porch screen door creaked. “Hi,” Liana said, shyly. With luck, streaks of mud and a strong tan disguised what her weak, light-headed sensation suggested was a shocking pallor. She steadied herself by holding onto the sofa and got mud on the upholstery. “Sorry, I—swam a little farther than I’d planned. I hope you didn’t worry.” “We did worry,” Regent said sternly. Her face flickered between anger and relief, an expression that reminded Liana of her mother. “It’s after dark.” “I guess with the stars, the moon . . .” Liana covered. “It was so . . . peaceful.” The moon, in fact, had been obscured by cloud for the bulk of her wet grope back. Most of which had been conducted on her hands and knees in shallow water along the shore—land she was not about to let out of her clutches for one minute. The muck had been treacherous with more biting rocks. For long periods, the vista had been so inky that she’d found the Henleys’ rickety rowboat dock only because she had bumped into it. “What happened to your foot?” Regent cried. “Oh, that. Oh, nuts. I’m getting blood on your floor.” “Looks like a proper war wound, that,” Beano said boisterously. “We’re going to get that cleaned right up.” Examining the wound, Regent exclaimed, “My dear girl, you’re shaking!” Buy the print » “Yes, I may have gotten—a little chill.” Perhaps it was never too late to master the famously British knack for understatement. “Let’s get you into a nice hot shower first, and then we’ll bandage your foot. That cut looks deep, Liana. You really shouldn’t be so casual about it.” Liana weaved to the other side of the house, leaving red footprints down the hall. In previous showers here, she’d had trouble with scalding, but this time she couldn’t get the water hot enough. She huddled under the dribble until finally the water grew tepid, and then, with a shudder, wrapped herself in one of their big white bath sheets, trying to keep from getting blood on the towel. Emerging in jeans and an unseasonably warm sweater she’d found in the guest room’s dresser, Liana was grateful for the cut on her foot, which gave Regent something to fuss over and distracted her hostess from the fact that she was still trembling. Regent trickled the oozing inch-long gash with antiseptic and bound it with gauze and adhesive tape, whose excessive swaddling didn’t make up for its being several years old; the tape was discolored, and barely stuck. Meanwhile, Liana threw the couple a bone: she told them how she had injured her foot, embellishing just enough to make it a serviceable story. The foot story was a decoy. It obviated telling the other one. At twenty-three, Liana hadn’t accumulated many stories; until now, she had hungered for more. Vastly superior to carvings of hippos, stories were the souvenirs that this bold stint in Africa had been designed to provide. Whenever she’d scored a proper experience in the past, like the time she’d dated a man who confided that he’d always felt like a woman, or even when she’d had her e-mail hacked, she’d traded on the tale at every opportunity. Perhaps if she’d returned to her parents after this latest ordeal, she’d have burst into tears and delivered the blow-by-blow. But she was abruptly aware that these people were virtual strangers. She’d only make them even more nervous about whether she was irresponsible or lead them to believe that she was an attention-seeker with a tendency to exaggerate. It was funny how when some little nothing went down you played it for all it was worth, but when a truly momentous occurrence shifted the tectonic plates in your mind you kept your mouth shut. Because instinct dictated that this one was private. Now she knew: there was such a thing as private. Having aged far more than a few hours this evening, Liana was disheartened to discover that maturity could involve getting smaller. She had been reduced. She was a weaker, more fragile girl than the one who’d piled into Regent’s jeep that afternoon, and in some manner that she couldn’t put her finger on she also felt less real—less here—since in a highly plausible alternative reality she was not here. The couple made a to-do over the importance of getting hot food inside her, but before the dinner had warmed Liana curled around the leopard-print pillow on the sofa and dropped into a comatose slumber. Intuiting something—Beano himself had survived any number of close calls, the worst of which he had kept from Regent, lest she lay down the law that he had to stop hunting in Botswana even sooner than she did—he discouraged his wife from rousing the girl even to go to bed, draping her gently in a mohair blanket and carefully tucking the fringe around her pretty wet head. Predictably, Liana grew into a civilized woman with a regard for the impositions of laundry. She pursued a practical career in marketing in New York, and, after three years, ended an impetuous marriage to an Afghan. Meantime, starting with Kilifi Creek, she assembled an offbeat collection. It was a class of moments that most adults stockpile: the times they almost died. Rarely was there a good reason, or any warning. No majestic life lessons presented themselves in compensation for having been given a fright. Most of these incidents were in no way heroic, like the rescue of a child from a fire. They were more a matter of stepping distractedly off a curb, only to feel the draught of the M4 bus flattening your hair. Not living close to a public pool, Liana took up running in her late twenties. One evening, along her usual route, a minivan shot out of a parking garage without checking for pedestrians and missed her by a whisker. Had she not stopped to double-knot her left running shoe before leaving her apartment, she would be dead. Later: She was taking a scuba-diving course on Cape Cod when a surge about a hundred feet deep dislodged her mask and knocked her regulator from her mouth. The Atlantic was unnervingly murky, and her panic was absolute. Sure, they taught you to make regular decompression stops, and to exhale evenly as you ascended, but it was early in her training. If her instructor hadn’t managed to grab her before she bolted for the surface while holding her breath, her lungs would have exploded and she would be dead. Still later: Had she not unaccountably thought better of shooting forward on her Citi Bike on Seventh Avenue when the light turned green, the garbage truck would still have taken a sharp left onto Sixteenth Street without signalling, and she would be dead. There was nothing else to learn, though that was something to learn, something inchoate and large. The scar on her right foot, wormy and white (the flap should have been stitched), became a totem of this not-really-a-lesson. Oh, she’d considered the episode, and felt free to conclude that she had overestimated her swimming ability, or underestimated the insidious, bigger-than-you powers of water. She could also sensibly have decided that swimming alone anywhere was tempting fate. She might have concocted a loftier version, wherein she had been rescued by an almighty presence who had grand plans for her—grander than marketing. But that wasn’t it. Any of those interpretations would have been plastered on top, like the poorly adhering bandage on that gash. The message was bigger and dumber and blunter than that, and she was a bright woman, with no desire to disguise it. After Liana was promoted to director of marketing at BraceYourself—a rapidly expanding firm that made the neoprene joint supports popular with aging boomers still pounding the pavement—she moved from Brooklyn to Manhattan, where she could now afford a stylish one-bedroom on the twenty-sixth floor, facing Broadway. The awful Afghan behind her, she’d started dating again. The age of thirty-seven marked a good time in her life: she was well paid and roundly liked in the office; she relished New York; though she’d regained an interest in men, she didn’t feel desperate. Many a summer evening without plans she would pour a glass of wine, take the elevator to the top floor, and slip up a last flight of stairs; roof access was one of the reasons she’d chosen the apartment. Lounging against the railing sipping Chenin Blanc, Liana would bask in the lights and echoing taxi horns of the city, sometimes sneaking a cigarette. This time of year, the regal overlook made her feel rich beyond measure. The air was fat and soft in her hair—which was shorter now, with a becoming cut. So when she finally met a man whom she actually liked, she invited him to her building’s traditional Fourth of July potluck picnic on the roof to show it off. “Are you sure you’re safe, sitting there?” David said, solicitously. They had sifted away from the tables of wheat-berry salad and smoked-tofu patties to talk. His concern was touching; perhaps he liked her, too. But she was perfectly stable—lodged against the perpendicular railing on a northern corner, feet braced on a bolted-down bench, weight firmly forward—and her consort had nothing to fear. Liana may have grown warier of water, but heights had never induced the vertigo from which others suffered. Besides, David was awfully tall, and the small boost in altitude was equalizing. “You’re just worried that I’ll have a better view of the fireworks. Refill?” She leaned down for the Merlot on the bench for a generous pour into their plastic glasses. A standard fallback for a first date, they had been exchanging travel stories, and impetuously—there was something about this guy that she trusted—she told him about Kilifi Creek. Having never shared the tale, she was startled by how little time it took to tell. But that was the nature of these stories: they were about what could have happened, or should have happened, but didn’t. They were very nearly not stories at all. “That must have been pretty scary,” he said dutifully. He sounded let down, as if she’d told a joke without a punch line. “I wasn’t scared,” she reflected. “I couldn’t afford to be. Only later, and then there was no longer anything to be afraid of. That’s part of what was interesting: having been cheated of feeling afraid. Usually, when you have a near-miss, it’s an instant. A little flash, like, Wow. That was weird. This one went on forever, or seemed to. I was going to die, floating off on the Indian Ocean until I lost consciousness, or I wasn’t. It was a long time to be in this . . . in-between state.” She laughed. “I don’t know, don’t make me embarrassed. I’ve no idea what I’m trying to say.” Attempting to seem captivated by the waning sunset, Liana no more than shifted her hips, by way of expressing her discomfort that her story had landed flat. Nothing foolhardy. For the oddest moment, she thought that David had pushed her, and was therefore not a nice man at all but a lunatic. Because what happened next was both enormously subtle and plain enormous—the way the difference between knocking over a glass and not knocking over a glass could be a matter of upsetting its angle by a single greater or lesser degree. Greater, this time. Throw any body of mass that one extra increment off its axis, and rather than barely brush against it you might as well have hurled it at a wall. With the same quiet clarity with which she had registered, in Kilifi, I am being swept out to sea, she grasped simply, Oh. I lost my balance. For she was now executing the perfect back flip that she’d never been able to pull off on a high dive. The air rushed in her ears like water. This time the feeling was different—that is, the starkness was there, the calmness was there also, but these clean, serene sensations were spiked with a sharp surprise, which quickly morphed to perplexity, and then to sorrow. She fit in a wisp of disappointment before the fall was through. Her eyes tearing, the lights of high-rises blurred. Above, the evening sky rippled into the infinite ocean that had waited to greet her for fourteen years: largely good years, really—gravy, a long and lucky reprieve. Then, of course, what had mattered was her body striking the line, and now what mattered was not striking it—and what were the chances of that? By the time she reached the sidewalk, Liana had taken back her surprise. At some point there was no almost. That had always been the message. There were bystanders, and they would get the message, too.

We’ve owned this house for—what—twelve years now, I reckon. Bought it from an elderly couple, the De Rougemonts, whose aroma you can still detect around the place, in the master especially, and in the home office, where the old buzzard napped on summer days, and a little bit in the kitchen, still. I remember going into people’s houses as a kid and thinking, Can’t they smell how they smell? Some houses were worse than others. The Pruitts next door had a greasy, chuck-wagon odor, tolerable enough. The Willots, who ran that fencing academy in their rec room, smelled like skunk cabbage. You could never mention the smells to your friends, because they were part of it, too. Was it hygiene? Or was it, you know, glandular, and the way each family smelled had to do with bodily functions deep inside their bodies? The whole thing sort of turned your stomach, the more you thought about it. Now I live in an old house that probably smells funny to outsiders. Or used to live. At the present time, I’m in my front yard, hiding out between the stucco wall and the traveller palms. There’s a light burning up in Meg’s room. She’s my sugar pie. She’s thirteen. From my vantage point I can’t make out Lucas’s bedroom, but as a rule Lucas prefers to do his homework downstairs, in the great room. If I were to sidle up to the house, I’d more than likely spy Lucas in his school V-neck and necktie, armed for success: graphing calculator (check), St. Boniface iPad (check), Latin Quizlet (check), bowl of Goldfish (check). But I can’t go up there now on account of it would violate the restraining order. I’m not supposed to come any closer than fifty feet to my lovely wife, Johanna. It’s an emergency T.R.O. (meaning temporary), issued at night, with a judge presiding. My lawyer, Mike Peekskill, is in the process of having it revoked. In the meantime, guess what? Yours truly, Charlie D., still has the landscape architect’s plans from when Johanna and I were thinking of replacing these palms with something less jungly and prone to pests. So I happen to know for certain that the distance from the house to the stucco wall is sixty-three feet. Right now, I reckon I’m about sixty or sixty-one, here in the vegetation. And, anyway, nobody can see me, because it’s February and already dark in these parts. It’s Thursday, so where’s Bryce? Right. Trumpet lessons with Mr. Talawatamy. Johanna’ll be going to pick him up soon. Can’t stay here long. If I were to leave my hideout and mosey around the side of the house, I’d see the guest room, where I used to retreat when Johanna and I were fighting real bad, and where, last spring, after Johanna got promoted at Hyundai, I commenced to putting the blocks to the babysitter, Cheyenne. And if I kept going all the way into the back yard I’d come face to face with the glass door I shattered when I threw that lawn gnome through it. Drunk at the time, of course. Yessir. Plenty of ammunition for Johanna to play Find the Bad Guy at couples counselling. It’s not cold cold out, but it is for Houston. When I reach down to take my phone out of my boot, my hip twinges. Touch of arthritis. I’m getting my phone to play Words with Friends. I started playing it over at the station, just to pass the time, but then I found out Meg was playing it, too, so I sent her a game invite. In mrsbieber vs. radiocowboy I see that mrsbieber has just played “poop.” (She’s trying to get my goat.) Meg’s got the first “p” on a double-word space and the second on a double-letter space, for a total score of twenty-eight. Not bad. Now I play an easy word, “pall,” for a measly score of nine. I’m up fifty-one points. Don’t want her to get discouraged and quit on me. I can see her shadow moving around up there. But she doesn’t play another word. Probably Skype-ing or blogging, painting her nails. Johanna and me—you say it “Yo-hanna,” by the way, she’s particular about that—we’ve been married twenty-one years. When we met I was living up in Dallas with my girlfriend at the time, Jenny Braggs. Back then I was consulting for only three stations, spread out over the state, so I spent most of every week on the road. Then one day I was up in San Antonio, at WWWR, and there she was. Johanna. Shelving CDs. She was a tall drink of water. “How’s the weather up there?” I said. “Pardon me?” “Nothing. Hi, I’m Charlie D. That an accent I hear?” “Yes. I’m German.” “Didn’t know they liked country music in Germany.” “They don’t.” “Maybe I should consult over there. Spread the gospel. Who’s your favorite country recording artist?” “I am more into opera,” Johanna said. “I getcha. Just here for the job.” After that, every time I was down San Antone way, I made a point of stopping by Johanna’s desk. It was less nerve-racking if she was sitting. “You ever play basketball, Johanna?” “No.” “Do they have girls’ basketball over there in Germany?” “In Germany I am not that tall,” Johanna said. That was about how it went. Then one day I come up to her desk and she looks at me with those big blue eyes of hers, and she says, “Charlie, how good an actor are you?” “Actor or liar?” “Liar.” “Pretty decent,” I said. “But I might be lying.” “I need a green card,” Johanna said. Roll the film: me emptying my water bed into the bathtub so I can move out, while Jenny Braggs weeps copious tears. Johanna and me cramming into a photo booth to take cute “early-relationship” photos for our “scrapbook.” Bringing that scrapbook to our immigration hearing, six months later. “Now, Ms. Lubbock—do I have that right?” “Lübeck,” Johanna told the officer. “There’s an umlaut over the ‘u.’ ” “Not in Texas there ain’t,” the officer said. “Now, Ms. Lubbock, I’m sure you can understand that the United States has to make certain that those individuals who we admit to a path of citizenship by virtue of their marrying U.S. citizens are really and truly married to those citizens. And so I’m going to have to ask you some personal questions that might seem a little intrusive. Do you agree to me doing that?” Johanna nodded. “When was the first time you and Mr. D.—” He stopped short and looked at me. “Hey, you aren’t the Charlie Daniels, are you?” “Nuh-uh. That’s why I just go by the D. To avoid confusion.” “Because you sort of look like him.” “I’m a big fan,” I said. “I take that as a compliment.” He turned back to Johanna, smooth as butter. “When was the first time you and Mr. D. had intimate sexual relations?” “You won’t tell my mother, will you?” Johanna said, trying to joke. But he was all business. “Before you were married or after?” “Before.” “And how would you rate Mr. D.’s sexual performance?” “What do you think? Wonderful. I married him, didn’t I?” “Any distinguishing marks on his sex organ?” “It says ‘In God We Trust.’ Like on all Americans.” The officer turned to me, grinning. “You got yourself a real spitfire here,” he said. “Don’t I know it,” I said. Back then, though, we weren’t sleeping together. That didn’t happen till later. In order to pretend to be my fiancée, and then my bride, Johanna had to spend time with me, getting to know me. She’s from Bavaria, Johanna is. She had herself a theory that Bavaria is the Texas of Germany. People in Bavaria are more conservative than your normal European leftist. They’re Catholic, if not exactly God-fearing. Plus, they like to wear leather jackets and such. Johanna wanted to know everything about Texas, and I was just the man to teach her. I took her to SXSW, which wasn’t the cattle call it is today. And oh my Lord if Johanna didn’t look good in a pair of bluejeans and cowboy boots. Next thing I know we’re flying home to Michigan to meet my folks. (I’m from Traverse City, originally. Got to talking this way on account of living down here so long. My brother Ted gives me a hard time about it. I tell him you gotta talk the talk in the business I’m in.) Maybe it was Michigan that did it. It was wintertime. I took Johanna snowmobiling and ice fishing. My mama would never have seen eye to eye on the whole green-card thing, so I just told her we were friends. Once we got up there, though, I overheard Johanna telling my sister that we were “dating.” On perch night at the V.F.W. hall, after drinking a few P.B.R.s, Johanna started holding my hand under the table. I didn’t complain. I mean, there she was, all six-foot-plus of her, healthy as can be and with a good appetite, holding my hand in hers, secret from everyone else. I’ll tell you, I was happier than a two-peckered dog. My mother put us in separate bedrooms. But one night Johanna came into mine, quiet as an Injun, and crawled into bed. “This part of the Method acting?” I said. “No, Charlie. This is real.” She had her arms around me, and we were rocking, real soft-like, the way Meg did after we gave her that kitten, before it died, I mean, when it was just a warm and cuddly thing instead of like it had hoof and mouth, and went south on us. “Feels real,” I said. “Feels like the realest thing I ever did feel.” “Does this feel real, too, Charlie?” “Yes, Ma’am.” “And this?” “Lemme see. Need to reconnoitre. Oh yeah. That’s real real.” Love at fifteenth sight, I guess you’d call it. I look up at my house and cogitate some—I don’t rightly want to say what about. The thing is, I’m a successful man in the prime of life. Started d.j.-ing in college, and, O.K., my voice was fine for the 3-to-6-A.M. slot at Marquette, but out in the real world there was an upper limit, I’ll admit. Never did land me a job in front of a microphone. Telemarketed instead. Then the radio itch got back into me and I started consulting. This was in the eighties, when you had your first country-rock crossovers. A lot of stations were slow to catch on. I told them who and what to play. Started out contracting for three stations and now I’ve got sixty-seven coming to me asking, “Charlie D., how do we increase our market share? Give us your crossover wisdom, Sage of the Sagebrush.” (That’s on my Web site. People have sort of picked it up.) But what I’m thinking right now doesn’t make me feel so sagelike. In fact, not even a hair. I’m thinking, How did this happen to me? To be out here in the bushes? Find the Bad Guy is a term we learned at couples counselling. Me and Johanna saw this lady therapist for about a year, name of Dr. van der Jagt. Dutch. Had a house over by the university, with separate paths to the front and the back doors. That way, people leaving didn’t run into those showing up. Say you’re coming out of couples therapy and your next-door neighbor’s coming in. “Hey, Charlie D.,” he says. “How’s it going?” And you say, “The missus has just been saying I’m verbally abusive, but I’m doing O.K. otherwise.” Naw. You don’t want that. Tell the truth, I wasn’t crazy about our therapist being a woman, plus European. Thought it would make her partial to Johanna’s side of things. At our first session, Johanna and I chose opposite ends of the couch, keeping throw pillows between us. Dr. van der Jagt faced us, her scarf as big as a horse blanket. She asked what brought us. Talking, making nice, that’s the female department. I waited for Johanna to start in. But the same cat got her tongue as mine. Dr. van der Jagt tried again. “Johanna, tell me how you are feeling in the marriage? Three words.” “Frustrated. Angry. Alone.” “Why?” “When we met, Charlie used to take me dancing. Once we had kids, that stopped. Now we both work full time. We don’t see each other all day long. But as soon as Charlie comes home he goes out to his fire pit—” “You’re always welcome to join me,” I said. “—and drinks. All night. Every night. He is married more to the fire pit than to me.” I was there to listen, to connect with Johanna, and I tried my best. But after a while I stopped paying attention to her words and just listened to her voice, the foreign sound of it. It was like if Johanna and I were birds, her song wouldn’t be the song I’d recognize. It would be the song of a species of bird from a different continent, some species that nested in cathedral belfries or windmills, which, to my kind of bird, would be like, Well, la-di-da. For instance, regarding the fire pit. Didn’t I try to corral everyone out there every night? Did I ever say I wanted to sit out there alone? No, sir. I’d like us to be together, as a family, under the stars, with the mesquite flaming and popping. But Johanna, Bryce, Meg, and even Lucas—they never want to. Too busy on their computers or their Instagrams. “How do you feel about what Johanna is saying?” Dr. van der Jagt asked me. “Well,” I said. “When we bought the house, Johanna was excited about the fire pit.” “I never liked the fire pit. You always think that, because you like something, I like the same thing.” “When the real-estate lady was showing us around, who was it said, ‘Hey, Charlie, look at this! You’re gonna love this’?” “Ja, and you wanted a Wolf stove. You had to have a Wolf stove. But have you ever cooked anything on it?” “Grilled those steaks out in the pit that time.” Right around there, Dr. van der Jagt held up her soft little hand. “We need to try to get beyond these squabbles. We need to find what’s at the core of your unhappiness. These things are only on the surface.” “I always get stuck in the wrong line.”Buy the print » We went back the next week, and the week after that. Dr. van der Jagt had us fill out a questionnaire ranking our level of marital contentment. She gave us books to read: “Hold Me Tight,” which was about how couples tend to miscommunicate, and “The Volcano Under the Bed,” which was about overcoming sexual dry spells and made for some pretty racy reading. I took off the covers of both books and put on new ones. That way, people at the station thought I was reading Tom Clancy. Little by little, I picked up the lingo. Find the Bad Guy means how, when you’re arguing with your spouse, both people are trying to win the argument. Who didn’t close the garage door? Who left the Bigfoot hair clump in the shower drain? What you have to realize, as a couple, is that there is no bad guy. You can’t win an argument when you’re married. Because if you win, your spouse loses, and resents losing, and then you lose, too, pretty much. Due to the fact that I was a defective husband, I started spending a lot of time alone, being introspective. What I did was go to the gym and take a sauna. I’d dropper some eucalyptus into a bucket of water, toss the water on the fake rocks, let the steam build up, then turn over the miniature hourglass, and, for however long it took to run out, I’d introspect. I liked to imagine the heat burning all my excess cargo away—I could stand to lose a few, like the next guy—until all that was left was a pure residue of Charlie D. Most other guys hollered that they were cooked after ten minutes and red-assed it out of there. Not me. I just turned the hourglass over and hunkered on down some more. Now the heat was burning away my real impurities. Things I didn’t even tell anyone about. Like the time after Bryce was born and had colic for six straight months, when in order to keep from throwing him out the window what I did was drink a couple bourbons before dinner and, when no one was looking, treat Forelock as my personal punching bag. He was just a puppy then, eight or nine months. He’d always done something. A grown man, beating on my own dog, making him whimper so Johanna’d call out, “Hey! What are you doing?” and I’d shout back, “He’s just faking! He’s a big faker!” Or the times, more recent, when Johanna was flying to Chicago or Phoenix and I’d think, What if her plane goes down? Did other people feel these things, or was it just me? Was I evil? Did Damien know he was evil in “The Omen” and “Omen II”? Did he think “Ave Satani” was just a catchy soundtrack? “Hey, they’re playing my song!” My introspecting must have paid off, because I started noticing patterns. As a for instance, Johanna might come into my office to hand me the cap of the toothpaste I’d forgotten to screw back on, and, later, that would cause me to say “Achtung!” when Johanna asked me to take out the recycling, which would get Johanna madder than a wet hen, and before you know it we’re fighting World War Three. In therapy, when Dr. van der Jagt called on me to speak, I’d say, “On a positive note this week, I’m becoming more aware of our demon dialogues. I realize that’s our real enemy. Not each other. Our demon dialogues. It feels good to know that Johanna and I can unite against those patterns, now that we’re more cognizant.” But it was easier said than done. One weekend we had dinner with this couple. The gal, Terri, worked with Johanna over at Hyundai. The husband, name of Burton, was from out East. Though you wouldn’t know it to look at me, I was born with a shy temperament. To relax in a social context, I like to throw back a few margaritas. I was feeling O.K. when the gal, Terri, put her elbows on the table and leaned toward my wife, gearing up for some girl talk. “So how did you guys meet?” Terri said. I was involved with Burton in a conversation about his wheat allergy. “It was supposed to be a green-card marriage,” Johanna said. “At first,” I said, butting in. Johanna kept looking at Terri. “I was working at the radio station. My visa was running out. I knew Charlie a little. I thought he was a really nice guy. So, ja, we got married, I got a green card, and, you know, ja, ja.” “That makes sense,” Burton said, looking from one of us to the other, and nodding, like he’d figured out a riddle. “What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Charlie, be nice,” Johanna said. “I am being nice,” I said. “Do you think I’m not being nice, Burton?” “I just meant your different nationalities. Had to be a story behind that.” The next week at couples counselling was the first time I started the conversation. “My issue is,” I said. “Hey, I’ve got an issue. Whenever people ask how we met, Johanna always says she married me for a green card. Like our marriage was just a piece of theatre.” “I do not,” Johanna said. “You sure as shooting do.” “Well, it’s true, isn’t it?” “What I’m hearing from Charlie,” Dr. van der Jagt said, “is that when you do that, even though you might feel that you are stating the facts, what it feels like, for Charlie, is that you are belittling your bond.” “What am I supposed to say?” Johanna said. “Make up a story to say how we met?” According to “Hold Me Tight,” what happened when Johanna told Terri about the green card was that my attachment bond was threatened. I felt like Johanna was pulling away, so that made me want to seek her out, by trying to have sex when we got home. Due to the fact that I hadn’t been all that nice to Johanna during our night out (due to I was mad about the green-card thing), she wasn’t exactly in the mood. I’d also had more than my fill of the friendly creature. In other words, it was a surly, drunken, secretly needy, and frightened life-mate who made the move across the memory foam. The memory foam being a point of contention in itself, because Johanna loves that mattress, while I’m convinced it’s responsible for my lower-lumbar pain. That was our pattern: Johanna fleeing, me bloodhounding her trail. I was working hard on all this stuff, reading and thinking. After about three months of counselling, things started getting rosier around La Casa D. For one thing, Johanna got that promotion I mentioned, from local rep to regional. We made it a priority to have some together time together. I agreed to go easier on the sauce. Around about this same time, Cheyenne, the little gal who babysat for us, showed up one night smelling like a pigpen. Turned out her father had kicked her out. She’d moved in with her brother, but there were too many drugs there, so she left. Every guy who offered her a place to stay only wanted one thing, so finally Cheyenne ended up sleeping in her Chevy. At that point Johanna, who’s a soft touch and throws her vote away on the Green Party, offered Cheyenne a room. What with Johanna travelling more, we needed extra help with the kids, anyway. Every time Johanna came back from a trip, the two of them were like best friends, laughing and carrying on. Then Johanna’d leave and I’d find myself staring out the window while Cheyenne suntanned by the pool. I could count her every rib. Plus, she liked the fire pit. Came down most every night. “Care to meet my friend, Mr. George Dickel?” I said. Cheyenne gave me a look like she could read my mind. “I ain’t legal, you know,” she said. “Drinking age.” “You’re old enough to vote, ain’t you? You’re old enough to join the armed forces and defend your country.” I poured her a glass. Seemed like she’d had some before. All those nights out by the fire with Cheyenne made me forget that I was me, Charlie D., covered with sunspots and the marks of a long life, and Cheyenne was Cheyenne, not much older than the girl John Wayne goes searching for in “The Searchers.” I started texting her from work. Next thing I know I’m taking her shopping, buying her a shirt with a skull on it, or a fistful of thongs from Victoria’s Secret, or a new Android phone. “I ain’t sure I should be accepting all this stuff from you,” Cheyenne said. “Hey, it’s the least I can do. You’re helping me and Johanna out. It’s part of the job. Fair payment.” I was half daddy, half sweetheart. At night by the fire we talked about our childhoods, mine unhappy long ago, hers unhappy in the present. Johanna was gone half of each week. She came back hotel-pampered, expecting room service and the toilet paper folded in a V. Then she was gone again. One night I was watching “Monday Night.” A Captain Morgan commercial came on—I get a kick out of those—put me in mind of having me a Captain Morgan-and-Coke, so I fixed myself one. Cheyenne wandered in. “What you watching?” she asked. “Football. Want a drink? Spiced rum.” “No, thanks.” “You know those thongs I bought you the other day? How they fit?” “Real good.” “You could be a Victoria’s Secret model, I swear, Cheyenne.” “I could not!” She laughed, liking the idea. “Why don’t you model one of them thongs for me. I’ll be the judge.” Cheyenne turned toward me. All the kids were asleep. Fans were shouting on the TV. Staring straight into my eyes, Cheyenne undid the clasp of her cut-offs and let them fall to the floor. I got down on my knees, prayerful-like. I mashed my face against Cheyenne’s hard little stomach, trying to breathe her in. I moved it lower. In the middle of it all, Cheyenne lifted her leg, Captain Morgan style, and we busted up. Terrible, I know. Shameful. Pretty easy to find the bad guy here. Twice, maybe three times. O.K., more like seven. But then one morning Cheyenne opens her bloodshot teen-age eyes and says, “You know, you could be my granddaddy.” Next, she calls me at work, completely hysterical. I pick her up, we go down to the CVS for a home pregnancy test. She’s so beside herself she can’t even wait to get back home to use it. Makes me pull over, then goes down into this gulch and squats, comes back with mascara running down her cheeks. “I can’t have a baby! I’m only nineteen!” “Well, Cheyenne, let’s think a minute,” I said. “You gonna raise this baby, Charlie D.? You gonna support me and this baby? You’re old. Your sperm are old. Baby might come out autistic.” “Where did you read that?” “Saw it on the news.” She didn’t need to think long. I’m anti-abortion but, under the circumstances, decided it was her choice. Cheyenne told me she’d handle the whole thing. Made the appointment herself. Said I didn’t even need to go with her. All she needed was three thousand dollars. Yeah, sounded high to me, too. Week later, I’m on my way to couples therapy with Johanna. We’re coming up Dr. van der Jagt’s front path when my phone vibrates in my pocket. I open the door for Johanna and say, “After you, darlin’.” The message was from Cheyenne: “It’s over. Have a nice life.” Never was pregnant. That’s when I realized. I didn’t care either way. She was gone. I was safe. Dodged another bullet. And then what did I go and do? I walked into Dr. van der Jagt’s office and sat down on the couch and looked over at Johanna. My wife. Not as young as she used to be, sure. But older and more worn out because of me, mainly. Because of raising my kids and doing my laundry and cooking my meals, all the while holding down a full-time job. Seeing how sad and tuckered out Johanna looked, I felt all choked up. And as soon as Dr. van der Jagt asked me what I had to say, the whole story came rushing out of me. I had to confess my crime. Felt like I’d explode if I didn’t. Which means something. Which means, when you get down to it, that the truth is true. The truth will out. Up until that moment, I wasn’t so sure. When our fifty minutes was up, Dr. van der Jagt directed us to the back door. As usual, I couldn’t help keeping an eye out for anyone who might see us. But what were we skulking around for, anyway? What were we ashamed of? We were just two people in love and in trouble, going to our Nissan to pick up our kids from school. Over in the Alps, when they found that prehistoric man frozen in the tundra and dug him out, the guy they call Ötzi, they saw that aside from wearing leather shoes filled with grass and a bearskin hat he was carrying a little wooden box that contained an ember. That’s what Johanna and I were doing, going to marital therapy. We were living through an Ice Age, armed with bows and arrows. We had wounds from previous skirmishes. All we had if we got sick were some medicinal herbs. There’s a flint arrowhead lodged in my left shoulder. Ouch. But we had this ember box with us, and if we could just get it somewhere—I don’t know, a cave, or a stand of pines—we could use this ember to reignite the fire of our love. A lot of the time, while I was sitting there stony-faced on Dr. van der Jagt’s couch, I was thinking about Ötzi, all alone out there, when he was killed. Murdered, apparently. They found a fracture in his skull. You have to realize that things aren’t so bad nowadays as you might think. Human violence is way down since prehistoric times, statistically. If we’d lived when Ötzi did, we’d have to watch our backs anytime we took a saunter. Under those conditions, who would I want at my side more than Johanna, with her broad shoulders and strong legs and used-to-be-fruitful womb? She’s been carrying our ember the whole time, for years now, despite all my attempts to blow it out. Buy the print » At the car, wouldn’t you know it, but my key fob chose right then not to work. I kept pressing and pressing. Johanna stood on the gravel, looking small, for her, and crying, “I hate you! I hate you!” I watched my wife crying from what felt like a long way off. This was the same woman who, when we were trying to have Lucas, called me on the phone and said, like Tom Cruise in “Top Gun,” “I feel the need for seed!” I’d rush home from work, stripping off my vest and string tie as I hurried into the bedroom, sometimes leaving my cowboy boots on (though that didn’t feel right, and I tried not to), and there would be Johanna, lying on her back with her legs and arms spread out in welcome, her cheeks fiery red, and I leapt and fell, and kept falling, it felt like, forever, down into her, both of us lost in the sweet, solemn business of making a baby. So that’s why I’m out here in the bushes. Johanna kicked me out. I’m living downtown now, near the theatre district, renting a two-bedroom in the overpriced condos they built before the crash and now can’t fill. I’d wager I’m about sixty feet away from the house now. Maybe fifty-nine. Think I’ll get closer. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven. How do you like that, Lawman? I’m standing next to one of the floodlights when I remember that restraining orders aren’t calculated in feet. They’re in yards. I’m supposed to be staying fifty yards away! Tarnation. But I don’t move. Here’s why. If I’m supposed to be fifty yards away, that means I’ve been violating the restraining order for weeks. I’m guilty already. So, might as well get a little closer. Up onto the front porch, for instance. Just like I thought: front door’s open. God damn it, Johanna! I think. Just leave the house wide open for any home invader to waltz right in, why don’t you? For a minute, it feels like old times. I’m angrier than a hornet, and I’m standing in my own house. A sweet urge of self-justification fills me. I know who the bad guy is here. It’s Johanna. I’m just itching to go and find her and shout, “You left the front door open! Again.” But I can’t right now, because, technically, I’m breaking and entering. Then the smell hits me. It’s not the De Rougemonts. It’s partly dinner—lamb chops, plus cooking wine. Nice. Partly, too, a shampoo smell from Meg’s having just showered upstairs. Moist, warm, perfumey air is filtering down the staircase. I can feel it on my cheeks. I can also smell Forelock, who’s too old to even come and greet his master, which under the circumstances is O.K. by me. It’s all these smells at once, which means that it’s our smell. The D.s! We’ve finally lived here long enough to displace the old-person smell of the De Rougemonts. I just didn’t realize it before. I had to get kicked out of my own house to be able to come and smell this smell, which I don’t think, even if I were a little kid with super-smelling abilities, would be anything other than pleasant. Upstairs Meg runs out of her bedroom. “Lucas!” she shouts. “What did you do with my charger!” “I didn’t do anything,” he says back. (He’s up in his bedroom.) “You took it!” “I did not!” “Yes, you did!” “Mom!” Meg yells, and comes to the top of the stairs, where she sees me. Or maybe doesn’t. She needs to wear her glasses. She stares down to where I’m standing in the shadows and she shouts, “Mom! Tell Lucas to give me back my charger!” I hear something, and turn. And there’s Johanna. When she sees me, she does a funny thing. She jumps back. Her face goes white and she says, “Guys! Stay upstairs!” Hey, come on, I’m thinking. It’s just me. Johanna presses the speed-dial on her phone, still backing away. “You don’t have to do that,” I say. “Come on now, Jo-Jo.” She gets on with 911. I take a step toward her with my hand out. I’m not going to grab the phone. I just want her to hang up and I’ll leave. But suddenly I’m holding the phone, Johanna’s screaming, and, out of nowhere, something jumps me from behind, tackling me to the ground. It’s Bryce. My son. He isn’t at trumpet lessons. Maybe he quit. I’m always the last to know. Bryce has got a rope in his hand, or an extension cord, and he’s strong as a bull. He always did take after Johanna’s side. He’s pressing his knee hard into my back, trying to hog-tie me with the extension cord. “Got him, Mom!” he shouts. I’m trying to talk. But my son has my face smashed down into the rug. “Hey, Bryce, lemme go,” I say. “It’s Pa. It’s Pa down here. Bryce? I’m not kidding now.” I try an old Michigan wrestling move, scissor kick. Works like a charm. I flip Bryce off me, onto his back. He tries to scramble away but I’m too fast for him. “Hey, now,” I say. “Who’s your daddy now, Bryce? Huh? Who’s your daddy?” That’s when I notice Meg, higher on the stairs. She’s been frozen there the whole time. But when I look at her now she hightails it. Scared of me. Seeing that takes all the fight out of me. Meg? Sugar pie? Daddy won’t hurt you. But she’s gone. “O.K.,” I say. “Ah’mo leave now.” I turn and go outside. Look up at the sky. No stars. I put my hands in the air and wait. After bringing me to headquarters, the officer removed my handcuffs and turned me over to the sheriff, who made me empty my pockets: wallet, cell phone, loose change, 5-Hour Energy bottle, and an Ashley Madison ad torn from some magazine. He had me put all that stuff in a ziplock and sign a form vouching for the contents. It was too late to call my lawyer’s office, so I called Peekskill’s cell and left a message on his voice mail. I asked if that counted as a call. It did. They took me down the hall to an interrogation room. After about a half hour, a guy I haven’t seen before, detective, comes in and sits down. “How much you had tonight?” he asks me. “A few.” “Bartender at Le Grange said you came in around noon and stayed through happy hour.” “Yessir. Not gonna lie to you.” The detective pushes himself back in his chair. “We get guys like you in here all the time,” he says. “Hey, I know how you feel. I’m divorced, too. Twice. You think I don’t want to stick it to my old lady sometimes? But you know what? She’s the mother of my children. That sound corny to you? Not to me it doesn’t. You have to make sure she’s happy, whether you like it or not. Because your kids are going to be living with her and they’re the ones that’ll pay the price.” “They’re my kids, too,” I say. My voice sounds funny. “I hear you.” With that, he goes out. I look around the room, making sure there isn’t a two-way mirror, like on “Law & Order,” and when I’m satisfied I just hang my head and cry. When I was a kid, I used to imagine getting arrested and how cool I’d act. They wouldn’t get nothing out of me. A real outlaw. Well, now I am arrested, and all I am is a guy with gray stubble on my cheeks, and my nose still bleeding a little from when Bryce mashed it against the rug. There’s a thing they’ve figured out about love. Scientifically. They’ve done studies to find out what keeps couples together. Do you know what it is? It isn’t getting along. Isn’t having money, or children, or a similar outlook on life. It’s just checking in with each other. Doing little kindnesses for each other. At breakfast, you pass the jam. Or, on a trip to New York City, you hold hands for a second in a smelly subway elevator. You ask “How was your day?” and pretend to care. Stuff like that really works. Sounds pretty easy, right? Except most people can’t keep it up. In addition to finding the bad guy in every argument, couples do this thing called the Protest Polka. That’s a dance where one partner seeks reassurance about the relationship and approaches the other, but because that person usually does this by complaining or being angry, the other partner wants to get the hell away, and so retreats. For most people, this complicated maneuver is easier than asking, “How are your sinuses today, dear? Still stuffed? I’m sorry. Let me get you your saline.” While I’m thinking all this, the detective comes in again and says, “O.K. Vamoose.” He means I’m getting out. No argument from me. I follow him down the hall to the front of headquarters. I expect to see Peekskill, which I do. He’s shooting the breeze with the desk sergeant, using cheerful profanities. No one can say “you motherfucker” with more joie de vivre than Counsellor Peekskill. None of this surprises me at all. What surprises me is that, standing a few feet behind Peekskill, is my wife. “Johanna’s declining to press charges,” Peekskill tells me, when he comes over. “Legally, that doesn’t mean shit because the restraining order’s enforced by the state. But the police don’t want to charge you with anything if the wife’s not going to be behind it. I gotta tell you, though, this isn’t going to help you before the judge. We may not be able to get this thing revoked.” “Never?” I say. “I’m within fifty yards of her right now.” “True, but you’re in a police station.” “Can I talk to her?” “You want to talk to her? I don’t advise that right now.” But I’m already crossing the precinct lobby. Johanna is standing by the door, her head down. I’m not sure when I’m going to see her again, so I look at her real hard. I look at her but feel nothing. I can’t even tell if she’s pretty anymore. Probably she is. At social functions, other people, men, anyway, are always saying, “You look familiar. You didn’t used to be a Dallas cheerleader, did you?” I look. Keep looking. Finally, Johanna meets my eye. “I want to be a family again,” I say. Her expression is hard to read. But the feeling I get is that Johanna’s young face is lying under her new, older face, and that the older face is like a mask. I want her younger face to come out not only because it was the face I fell in love with but because it was the face that loved me back. I remember how it crinkled up whenever I came into a room. No crinkling now. More like a Halloween pumpkin, with the candle gone out. And then she tells me what’s what. “I tried for a long time, Charlie. To make you happy. I thought if I made more money it would make you happy. Or if we got a bigger house. Or if I just left you alone so you could drink all the time. But none of these things made you happy, Charlie. And they didn’t make me happy, either. Now that you’ve moved out, I’m sad. I am crying every night. But, as I now know the truth, I can begin to deal with it.” “This isn’t the only truth there is,” I say. It sounds more vague than I want it to, so I spread my arms wide—like I’m hugging the whole world—but this only ends up seeming even vaguer. I try again. “I don’t want to be the person I’ve been,” I say. “I want to be a better person.” This is meant sincerely. But, like most sincerities, it’s a little threadbare. Also, because I’m out of practice being sincere, I still feel like I’m lying. Not very convincing. “It’s late,” Johanna says. “I’m tired. I’m going home.” “Our home,” I say. But she’s halfway to her car already. I don’t know where I’m walking. Just wandering. I don’t much want to go back to my apartment. After me and Johanna bought our house, we went over to meet the owners, and you know what the old guy did to me? We were walking out to see the mechanical room—he wanted to explain about servicing the boiler—and he was walking real slow. Then right quick he turned around and looked at me with his old bald head, and he said, “Just you wait.” His spine was all catty-whompered. He could only shuffle along. So, in order to stave off the embarrassment of being closer to death than me, he hit me with that grim reminder that I’d end up just like him someday, shuffling around this house like an invalid. Thinking of Mr. De Rougement, I all of a sudden figure out what my problem is. Why I’ve been acting so crazy. It’s death. He’s the bad guy. Hey, Johanna. I found him! It’s death. I keep on walking, thinking about that. Lose track of time. When I finally look up, I’ll be god-darned if I ain’t in front of my house again! On the other side of the street, in legal territory, but still. My feet led me here out of habit, like an old plug horse. I take out my phone again. Maybe Meg played a word while I was in jail. No such luck. When a new word comes on Words with Friends, it’s a beautiful sight to see. The letters appear out of nowhere, like a sprinkle of stardust. I could be anywhere, doing anything, but when Meg’s next word flies through the night to skip and dance across my phone, I’ll know she’s thinking of me, even if she’s trying to beat me. When Johanna and I first went to bed, I was a little intimidated. I’m not a small man, but on top of Johanna? Sort of a “Gulliver’s Travels”-type situation. It was like Johanna had fallen asleep and I’d climbed up there to survey the scene. Beautiful view! Rolling hills! Fertile cropland! But there was only one of me, not a whole town of Lilliputians throwing ropes and nailing her down. But it was strange. That first night with Johanna, and more and more every night after, it was like she shrank in bed, or I grew, until we were the same size. And little by little that equalizing carried on into the daylight. We still turned heads. But it seemed as though people were just looking at us, a single creature, not two misfits yoked at the waist. Us. Together. Back then, we weren’t fleeing or chasing each other. We were just seeking, and, every time one of us went looking, there the other was, waiting to be found. We found each other for so long before we lost each other. Here I am! we’d say, in our heart of hearts. Come find me. Easy as putting a blush on a rainbow.

Now that his father was gone, and Benji was the only remaining male in the family, and having been bequeathed such an expansive estate, he’d do well to find himself a good woman, to marry her and take advantage of the family wealth, Mrs. Anyaogu explained to her guest. “A man must choose a wife and marry,” she said. “Even a man cannot go unmarried forever. People will begin to suspect.” Mrs. Anyaogu was wearing a yellow-gold head scarf, tied in the shape of a flower blossom. Benji, her son, was sitting across from her at the mahogany table. Much of the furniture in the house was mahogany, Mrs. Anyaogu’s choice of wood. Benji was not looking directly at his mother’s face but, rather, staring at a point somewhere behind her elaborately decorated head. “Already he’s pushing forty,” his mother continued. “Past pushing,” Benji said. “Forty-two in a couple of days.” Then suddenly he scowled, shaking his head in irritation. “Well, who am I supposed to marry, anyway?” he asked. “I don’t see the reason for the scowl,” his mother said. Benji carried on scowling. What else was there to do but scowl? Alare thought. A man his age, and with all his wealth, still unmarried and no evidence of any lovers? His mother was right. It was certainly not normal, not even for a man. Alare herself had got married fairly late—in her early thirties, to a man who was around the same age that Benji was now. Back then, she had hardly felt the gap in age between her husband and her, but these days she was feeling it more. She was only in her late fifties now—quite a few years younger than Mrs. Anyaogu. But, like Mrs. Anyaogu, and like any self-respecting woman or man, she had all the trappings of a family (though her children were grown and gone from home). Benji had light-brown skin, the kind that under bright light had a tendency to glow a little yellow, like an onye ocha’s—a white man’s. His hair was short, cropped very close to his head. His features were lean, his cheeks even a little sunken. Alare thought of him as the kind of man who spent hours mulling over nothing, so many hours that he often forgot to eat. These wealthy sorts had a tendency to cloud their minds with large quantities of nothing. She expected he was just the same. Alare had not married a wealthy man. In fact, the lowliness of his job was a sore subject for the marriage, which was the reason that Alare made it a point, in general, never to discuss her husband’s work in public. She had taken great pains all these years to dissociate herself where all his lowly jobs were concerned. Also, she had cautioned him never to bring up her name in his workplace. He did not argue with her about this or try to make her feel that she was being unreasonable; he, too, must have felt the embarrassment of his status. She had no reason to believe that he had ever gone against her wishes. She was the one who had finally gone against them. “A gardener,” she had eventually revealed to Mrs. Anyaogu, after persistent questioning. This was during their first meeting, some weeks ago. “A gardener?” Mrs. Anyaogu had replied. “Hmm.” There was a disappointed tone in her voice, and so Alare modified things a little. “He does construction on the side, too. Just once in a while. Part time. Fixing up old houses. That sort of thing.” It was somewhat true. Her husband did sometimes patch up the old cement walls of their bungalow. Patchwork only, because they were, after all, not wealthy enough to do a full renovation. “Ah! Construction!” Mrs. Anyaogu had exclaimed during that initial meeting, her prior disappointment fading away. This answer had seemed to please her better. Perhaps it had made Mrs. Anyaogu feel as if she were befriending someone slightly more on her level of the social ladder. Afterward, she had even insisted on referring to Alare’s husband as “the house doctor.” Well, wealthy husband or not, Alare was a God-fearing woman, and that, she reasoned, should have been enough to justify their new friendship. In fact, so God-fearing was she that when her precious congregation had disintegrated, owing to a scandal involving the pastor—a congregation that she had attended almost as long as she had been married to her husband—she did not lose her faith, did not give up attending church services altogether. Not all pastors were quacks, she knew. But it had indeed been a shock to her—to the entire congregation—that, all these years, the soft-spoken pastor had been pocketing the money that was supposed to go toward renovating the church. But then suddenly a part of the roof had caved in, and the rain poured in, drenching them all. Everything came out then, of course, and the pastor had no choice but to flee. After he left, the church crumbled, its walls and pews ruined by the rain. Little by little, the parishioners began to disappear. She would have stuck it out, but a congregation was not made of one person alone. Eventually, she had no choice but to disappear as well. Now she had found this Deeper Life congregation, and had been lucky enough to befriend Mrs. Anyaogu there. This was the reason for their lunch today. They had come out of church, and Mrs. Anyaogu had insisted on treating Alare to lunch. Such a long time since she’d had company over to the house, she’d said. Wouldn’t it be nice? They could get to know each other, perhaps form a friendship even outside of church. The parlor where they sat was spacious, and everything looked as if it had been taken from the pages of some American home-decorating catalogue. Or, not long before, Alare had visited the home of one of her former fellow-parishioners, and there she had watched a show on a channel called Home and Garden Television. The furniture and all the decorative elements in Mrs. Anyaogu’s home—the long, flowing, deep-purple drapes, the brass-trimmed lamps and shades, the leather sofas—could have been taken straight from that show as well. But there was something tacky, too, about the place: here and there were splashes of gold, the bright-yellow kind of plating that was more a distraction than a sign of good taste. The food was delicious: okra soup with fufu. Mrs. Anyaogu and Benji ate with forks, so Alare did, too, though she would have preferred to use her hands. Mrs. Anyaogu talked the whole time. This must have been what she always did, Alare decided, because Benji had a look of resignation on his face. He could have said something about it, something that would embarrass his mother, but he didn’t. A very polite young man, Alare concluded. Maybe even polite to a fault. Unexpectedly, Benji asked her what she thought about President Umaru Yar’Adua. Alare replied that her husband was a fan of the President. Her husband was always a fan of the aristos, even if he was not a fan of the Hausa-Fulani, of which Yar’Adua was a member. Her husband was Igbo, and not a fan of the Yoruba, either. Alare was Yoruba, but he had married her all the same, because, even beyond the exception that he made for aristocrats, his loyalties had a tendency to vacillate inexplicably. “Mama thinks Yar’Adua is a terrible President,” Benji said. “Well, he is,” Mrs. Anyaogu said with conviction. “For one thing, he’s too sick to run any country, let alone this country.” Shortly after, when they were long done with the meal, the house girls came to clear the table. Mrs. Anyaogu excused herself. She had some instructions to give the house girls about the coming week’s meals. Would Benji please entertain the guest while she attended to her duties as “Madam” of the house? Outside, the sun was shining. Benji led Alare to the back yard. This was the first time she had seen him standing: he had already been seated at the table when she arrived for lunch. Now she marvelled at the smallness of him. He was not exactly an akanshi—a dwarf—but for all intents and purposes he was. They arrived at the garden, which looked to Alare like a scaled-down version of the gardens at Versailles. (She had seen a picture of Versailles on a postcard a long time ago.) The hedges were so well manicured that they had almost no resemblance to nature. And the red hibiscus flowers and pink roses grew so perfectly that they could have been made of plastic. Alare caught a glimpse of a man in khaki shorts and a singlet. “Godwin,” Benji said. “Godwin Onuoha, the groundskeeper.” Godwin was in charge of trimming the hedges, cutting the grass, and keeping an eye on the property, Benji explained. He told Alare that Godwin was perhaps the most loyal house help his mother had ever had. Nearly fifteen years with the family, and each year he appeared more hardworking than the one before. Alare glanced around. He must be very hardworking, she thought. What a beautiful yard. But it was not the beauty of the yard that held her attention. Benji led her toward a set of wicker chairs. “We can enjoy the sun from here. This is a good spot for that. Maybe we can even take an afternoon siesta.” He pointed her to one of the chairs. She sat, but all the while she was thinking about his stature. Godwin was at least one and a half times the height of Benji. What a shame that Benji had to deal daily with a man who was a constant reminder of his inadequacies, she thought. Benji’s size, in combination with his light-yellow complexion, was probably why he was still single. Most women did not want a light-skinned man—most women she knew believed there was something effeminate about a man’s being so pale. Benji sat on the chair next to her. “I’m going to Dubai next week,” he said. “Ever been to Dubai?” “No,” she said. “You should go. It’s a very nice place. Good for relaxation.” She wondered exactly why he needed to relax. It didn’t appear that he held a job. From the look of things, he lived on family money, the earnings of his father and his father’s father. The little that Mrs. Anyaogu had told Alare implied that her husband, and his father, and his father’s father, had been colossal landowners, and, since they had invested wisely, she and her son could reap the reward. Anyway, if indeed he needed to relax, why did he have to go all the way to Dubai to do it? Why couldn’t he relax right here, in this beautiful garden, which would require no additional money—no airplane tickets, no hotel or dining costs. But she didn’t say any of this. Instead, she said, “I have a husband to attend to. Besides, how could I ever afford to go to Dubai?” Benji let out a brief embarrassed laugh and apologized for his lack of consideration. He hadn’t meant to dangle it in her face like that, he said. But it would be nice to go to Dubai, she thought. And she reasoned, too, that, even with his size and skin, some gold-digging young woman would eventually agree to marry him. A woman might be repulsed by him at first, but he seemed like a genuinely good person, very kind. Almost foolish in his kindness. Or was it all foolishness, and nothing to do with kindness? Well, no matter. There was the money. There was nothing repulsive about marrying into money. “You know, Mama is right,” he said, as if he’d heard fragments of Alare’s thoughts. “I should be married and with a family by now.” Alare remained silent. “But of course I’m not,” he continued. He paused thoughtfully, then said, “You know, she blames herself for how I turned out. Maybe there was something wrong with her womb. Maybe she didn’t feed me well. Maybe this. Maybe that. Once, at a restaurant, she overheard someone say something about my size and she began screaming, crying, pulling out her hair. She wound up on the floor, in a corner of the restaurant, her hair sticking up at odd angles from her head, her clothes dishevelled. She looked like a crazy old madwoman. All that guilt.” He sent Alare a postcard from Dubai, directly to her home. Had he got her address from his mother? Most likely so. The picture on the postcard was just an image of what appeared to be an expanse of red sand, with two or three greenish twigs sticking out from it. Then he sent her a second postcard, of a bright sun. On the back, he wrote, “Plenty of sunshine, and too much solitude.” As luck would have it, Alare would tell Benji afterward, she had gone to the mailbox before her husband did. One Sunday, a couple of weeks later, after service let out, Alare approached Mrs. Anyaogu and invited herself to lunch. She was swift with the self-invitation, so adept that Mrs. Anyaogu must have thought that she was the one who had done the inviting. Alare was sure that Benji would be back from Dubai by then. They had lunch again, then walked out into the gardens, sat on the wicker chairs, soaked in the sun once more. He announced that he might go on a trip to Asia next—Bangkok or Bali. Or maybe even Singapore. Mrs. Anyaogu suffered a heart attack. The pastor at Deeper Life made the announcement. After service, Alare found out that Benji was the one who had notified the pastor. He had rushed his mother to the hospital. She was now at home but would require lots of nursing. He would nurse her, and the family physician would come every few days. As such, Benji could no longer go on his trip to Asia. Alare made herself useful. She stopped by on the days when the physician was not making his house call. Despite Mrs. Anyaogu’s condition, Godwin saw to it that the compound still looked as good as ever. The house girls needed a bit more of a push, though. Alare saw to this—she gave them orders about what groceries to buy, what meals to prepare. Orders about which windows needed cleaning, which tables needed dusting. It came naturally to her, this role as their substitute Madam. In addition, she tended to other things, like helping Benji to administer Mrs. Anyaogu’s sponge bath and to give her her medications. She found that Benji’s small size somehow pleased her in bed. He was so unlike her husband that she could completely toss aside her husband’s image, and, with it, the guilt that should have accompanied her actions. Benji was essentially a virgin, though he said that he had gone down on a girl a long time ago, when he was at boarding school. The girl was several years his junior, and of small stature as well, so his size had not exactly been an issue. She had been an acquaintance, not quite a friend. That night, a group of her female friends had arranged to go out on dates with some boys, but she had not managed to find herself a boy. She was roaming aimlessly around the school compound when she ran into Benji, who was roaming aimlessly, too. He was always roaming aimlessly in those days. She dragged him into a corner where bushes grew, and began unbuttoning her blouse. There was something pitiful about her—such desperation. He felt sorry for her, not enough to go all the way, but enough so that when she took off her skirt and panties he conceded to getting down on his knees, conceded to pleasing her that way. “Do you feel sorry for me now? Is that the reason for what we are doing?” Alare asked. “No,” Benji said. “Not sorry at all.” “Good.” He produced a condom from his nightstand, and she wondered how long the box had been sitting there. Was it any good? Well, no matter. Later, she explained to him that this was not a habit of hers, that she did not go around cheating on her husband all the time. She realized that it was not Christian of her, but she was sure that God would forgive. God was always forgiving, she said. Look at the way he forgave the Israelites, the way he forgave Moses, the way he gave his only begotten son so that we might all be saved. God was always forgiving. She was sure that he would forgive her, too. Benji nodded. Perhaps Alare was right. And, if she was, then perhaps this could be looked upon as one of the upsides of Christianity. Not that he cared very much for the religion, upsides or downsides. It was just not his thing. In fact, he could count on one hand the number of times that he, as a grown man, had attended church services with his mother. It was an easy affair. Alare continued to come by whenever she pleased, which was every day. She told Benji that she simply gave her husband a half-truth: that she was helping take care of a sick friend. Her husband did not question. Probably nobody who knew of Benji’s diminutive stature would have questioned, she thought. Eventually, things changed. Her husband began having terrible bursts of pain in his head. And occasionally he had spasms in his limbs as well. He was looking thinner and thinner with every passing day. Alare told Benji that she had not informed him about her husband’s illness at first because she was waiting to see if it would go away. But now she was afraid that he would no longer be able to walk, much less tend to his work. He had to see a doctor, Benji said. She agreed, but where would they find the money? Not everybody had the wealth that Benji’s family did, Alare told him. “I guess letting him go is not an option?” Benji asked. Alare had a horrified look on her face. “Letting him go?” she repeated. “It’s a joke,” he said. He spoke apologetically. “He is a little in the way of things, but I would never sit aside and allow another man to die.” “Of course not,” she said. “What God-fearing person would?” It was evening now, and they sat dully in the parlor, facing the open windows, watching darkness envelop the sky. “How much do you think it’ll cost?” Benji asked. “Not sure yet, but maybe a few thousand nairas to begin.” “That’s not a lot,” he said. “No,” she said. “It’s possible we can even manage those beginning bills on our own,” she added thoughtfully. She looked seriously at Benji now, as if she’d suddenly had a revelation. She told him that she was not notifying him of her husband’s illness in order to beg him for money. She was not implying that he needed to help with the medical bills, and she was sorry if it had come out that way. What she was saying, rather, was that perhaps this was a sign. “A sign of what?” he asked. “You know,” she said. “A sign that I need to stop fooling around and stay home with my husband. Maybe it’s a sign that enough is enough.” “Maybe,” he said. “And that’s your decision to make.” They didn’t speak for some time. “But I really don’t mind helping with the bills,” he said. “No,” she said. “Really, I couldn’t ask that of you.” He was silent. She got up, straightened out her skirt, grabbed her handbag, and made to leave. “I probably won’t be back for a while—I’ll be running him around to his medical appointments, attending to him in general. I’m sorry,” she said. “Don’t be sorry,” he said, standing up, too. He reached into the back pocket of his trousers for his wallet. He took out a wad of thousand-naira notes and stretched out his hand to her. She was beside herself with shock. So much of it, right in front of her face. How could she turn it down now? She accepted. He would have Godwin bring her some more later, in an envelope, he told her. Just enough to cover what she estimated the bills would be. But she should try to put this whole thing out of her mind. She should not let it interfere with their relationship. As soon as her husband had healed, he wanted them to carry on as before. She nodded. “Of course,” she said. She could not wait for things to return to normal. Maybe soon. Maybe in a matter of two weeks, even. “Good,” he said. “Very good. I’m glad we are of the same mind.” She nodded again, and bent down to give him a small peck on the cheek before turning to leave. It took more than two weeks for her to return. Close to a month. By then, he was sad to report that his mother had passed. Alare’s husband, on the other hand, she said, was making tiny bits of progress, one day at a time. “Very good,” Benji said, and he assured her that he would continue to send Godwin over. Would it work to send a few thousand nairas every two weeks? Would that be enough? “Beggars can’t be choosers,” she said. She added that it was very kind of him to do that. And, as a matter of fact, it was good that he sent Godwin along with the money. She would feel rather strange if he were handing the money directly to her. “Strange?” he asked. “You know,” she said. “You know . . . Like those sorts of women.” “Ahh,” he said. He shook his head. “Don’t think of it that way.” “No, I suppose I won’t,” she said. “Anyway, my point is that it’s a good thing that we have the option of Godwin.” After his mother died, and while Alare was gone, Benji had taken on the project of opening a small convenience store in an abandoned shack nearby. The shack was an eyesore; all the houses around it were mansions. How could the owners of the mansions allow such a thing to exist in the same neighborhood as their designer homes? Well, he paid a decent sum to its owner and bought the shack. He hired a small construction crew, which renovated the shack in a matter of days—knocked down its walls, put up new ones. A shiny new roof, tiled floors, custom shelves. He then stocked the shelves with a good variety of items: Coca-Cola, chewing gum, Nabisco wafers, Ribena juice, bread. The store was now open. Benji himself was in charge of everything, from stocking the shelves to accounts management. Finally, he said, he could put his business education to use. Managing the store filled his days, especially as there were periods of time, which usually lasted about two weeks, when Alare could not keep him company, because she was once again attending to her husband and to his medical appointments. Of course, there were also periods of time when she visited him. Now that Benji’s mother was dead, they decided to tell Alare’s husband that she had found work as a cashier at a convenience store. That this was how she was getting the money to help with his hospital bills. It was true, in a sense. More and more she was with Benji at the convenience store, rather than at his family home. They stood behind the counter together, taking turns ringing up customers. But it was not all work. He had made sure to build a small addition to the shack, a secluded space at the back, which he furnished with a nice sofa bed, a coffee table, a small refrigerator stocked with soft drinks and mineral water and wine, and a dining table and chairs. During their afternoon breaks, he locked up the store and they headed to this small living space. Sometimes they reopened the store. Other times, they called it a day. It was early in the harmattan season that she made the announcement to Benji: her husband’s illness had taken a turn for the worse, and his doctors were telling him to go abroad for treatment. England was a good place to go, one doctor had said, or anywhere in Europe. But they should at least try South Africa. There was definitely access to better medical technology there than in Nigeria. She and Benji were standing behind the counter in the shop. She had just arrived, and had immediately broken the news. Was she actually considering it? Benji asked. She remained silent at first, but eventually she responded that she did not see how she had any other option. That is, if Benji was still willing to supply her with money she might as well do the best she could to keep the man alive. She would like the same to be done for her, if she were ever in her husband’s shoes. Benji nodded. He imagined that he might like the same for himself. “Well, how much more money this time?” “I think if you doubled it that should be enough,” she said. “But wouldn’t that depend on where?” “I’m thinking England is probably the best option,” she said. “I know London has some of the best doctors.” “O.K., so London it is,” he said. “You’re sure you don’t mind?” she asked. “It’s not much money in the grand scheme of things,” he said. “Even doubled.” “Thanks,” she said. He thought for a bit. Finally he asked, “And what of airfare and lodging?” This time it was she who was pensive. “That’s true,” she said. “I hadn’t thought of those.” And so it was settled. Again, she was gone for a month. He felt her absence more this time. But he did his best to busy himself with the store. The day she returned, he was sitting in the garden, contemplating his situation in a general and cloudy sort of way, when he looked up to find her approaching. It was Godwin who led her in, in his ribbed singlet and khakis, looking irritated. And of course Godwin would be irritated. He had been in the middle of mowing the front yard, Benji knew, and surely it must have been irksome to be disturbed. Well, annoyed or not, he escorted her all the same, and then he immediately returned to his work. There was a liveliness about her face, as if London had exceeded all her expectations. Benji had been to London himself, and the thought of being there was not one that enlivened him. There was, for one thing, the persistent rain and fog, and the general gloominess of the place. But he could see how all of that might have a certain appeal. Or perhaps the liveliness he saw was merely a sign of her being happy to have returned. She took her usual seat, on the wicker chair by his side. “So?” he asked. “We have to wait and see,” she said. “He’s not out of danger yet.” “Of course,” he said. “Healing always takes time.” She reached into her handbag and produced a small gift—a tiny glass replica of Big Ben. He grunted, but then quickly recovered and accepted. “How illness messes with things,” she said. “It certainly does,” he said. They continued to sleep together. Every once in a while, in the heat of her passion, Alare would remember that she had forgotten to refill one or more of her husband’s medicines. When she realized this, she’d disentangle herself immediately and scramble to get dressed. But this rarely happened, and so, when it did, Benji was usually willing to be forgiving. Anyway, what choice did he have? There were times, though, that she caught him sulking, and then she’d pause in the middle of getting dressed, and go back and lie next to him. She’d prop her head in her hands, her elbows resting on the bed, and gaze into Benji’s eyes. Her eyes would fill with tears as she told him what a wonderful man he was, how lucky she was to have him in her life. The tears would trickle down. He’d wipe them away with his hands. The stents that had been put into her husband’s heart were now somehow malfunctioning. This was less than a year after the London trip. The doctors were recommending Zurich this time, so Alare asked if Benji would mind once more doubling the money. He was under no obligation to do so, of course. It was just that her husband’s birthday was coming up this month, and wouldn’t it be terrible to allow him to die in the very month of his birth? Of course, Benji agreed to finance the trip. Godwin was on vacation, but Benji would find a way to get her the money, maybe send one of the house girls along with it. “All right,” Alare said. “I suppose that works fine, too.” If Alare had been there that month, Benji might not have grown sick of the convenience shop. He might not have abandoned it. But there was also the issue of the banana and groundnut hawkers, who had taken to parading the roads near the shop. There were also some bread hawkers, and it appeared to Benji that they would only continue to multiply, and so what need was there of a convenience store? The hawkers sold the items much cheaper, anyway. Who didn’t prefer cheaper? Just as quickly as he had built the store, he abandoned it. He decided to take up art instead. He bought himself some tubes of paint and paintbrushes, watercolor kits, sketching pads, canvases. He would become a painter, just sit there in the garden and paint whatever image happened to enter his mind. A tray of fruit, perhaps. Some trees. A daffodil. But mostly he painted images of Alare. Alare’s face when she smiled at him. Alare’s hands. Alare’s eyes. Her lips. She returned to find him painting. “What’s this? You think you have become the next Picasso?” she asked. “Exactly right,” he said, with a broad smile. But then it appeared to him that she was disheartened by this new undertaking. It seemed she would much rather have had him working at the convenience shop. Something about her demeanor said that she felt that painting was a waste of time and energy. He could understand, if that was indeed how she felt. Painting was not like selling goods in a store. With painting, there was no real potential for income. Well. She gave him the latest update. Her husband was doing much better. Much, much better. There would probably be no need for any more hospital admissions. Not for a long time, anyway. Just maintenance checkups for now, and so Benji could go back to giving the original amount. No doubling necessary anymore. Thank heavens, she said. He observed her face. She seemed to be doing well, too—she had even put on some weight, he noticed. In fact, when he thought about it, she had been putting on weight all these years, not shedding kilos like a person under the stress of dealing with a sick husband. Out of the blue one day—it was January; the udara trees were blooming orange and green—Godwin came pounding on the front door of the house. He was wearing not his usual singlet but a short-sleeved cotton shirt, well ironed, tucked neatly into trousers. A leather belt peeked out from his waist area. Benji had never seen him look so proper, so neat, so unlike the groundskeeper he knew. That morning Godwin had not shown up for work. In all the years that he had worked under Mrs. Anyaogu’s surveillance, this had happened only a handful of times, outside of vacations, and each incident had been for a very good reason. Eventually, Godwin would call to say that he was sick. Benji remembered that once it had been malaria. It had been a few weeks before Godwin returned to work. Well, here he was, not having reported to work in the morning, and no phone call, but looking very healthy, and perfectly dressed. The sun was shining brightly behind Godwin’s head, so Benji had to squint to see the groundskeeper’s face clearly. “Sah, very sorry, sah,” Godwin began in pidgin English. “Very sorry, sah.” “Very sorry about what?” Benji asked. Godwin explained that he was resigning, that he had found a job closer to home, not as well-paying as the one he was leaving behind, and with inconsistent hours, but it would suit him just fine. He was sorry to have to go this way, but it was better for everyone concerned, he said. Anyway, his youngest child had graduated from the university, and so he was done with school fees. What need was there to continue working so hard? He could finally rest. Spend more time with his wife. That sort of thing. Benji was astounded. By now, Alare seldom came to see him. When she did she came in the mornings, and stayed only a few hours. Of course, there were exceptions—days when she stayed almost the entire day. But these were rare. And now here was Godwin, preparing to leave, too. The house was growing lonelier. There were the house girls, yes, but they kept to themselves. He mostly saw them only when they served his meals. How long before they, too, decided to leave? He told Alare of Godwin’s resignation. “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. “He was such a good worker! It really is a shame!” Benji nodded. He remembered the money now. There was no longer Godwin to deliver it. Perhaps Benji could just give it directly to her, the way he had done that very first time, instead of sending anyone at all. What did she think? She nodded. “I guess that’s fine,” she said. In the absence of any other alternative, O.K., she would take the money directly from him. Besides, at this point she was sure they could both agree that she was not at all like those sorts of women. He nodded. “Of course not,” he said. “Don’t even think of it in those terms.” He had been in search of a set of very large paintbrushes, because he would be embarking on work on a large canvas. That was how the idea to drop by came to him, because at one moment he looked around and realized that his search for the paintbrushes had led him to her neighborhood. He could swing by, he thought. Just pop in to say a quick hello. What difference did it make if her husband was there with her? None, he decided, because her husband had, after all, never suspected him of anything. He cut across several roads, and walked down the path leading to her gate. It was a red metal gate, hanging just a little open. He entered. Inside, a driveway with a very shiny black Mercedes. Beside the Mercedes, a glistening silver Volvo. He had never thought to stop by and visit. And he had certainly never imagined, with all her talk of not being wealthy, that her home would look like this. Some people were always complaining of not having enough money, but perhaps it was those who complained the most that had the most. Or perhaps it was those who had the least that put on the best show of having the most. Which one was she? Well, the home was a detached unit, not far from the neighbors on both sides, but far enough, and different enough that it stuck out from the other houses. Clearly, work had been done to improve it. It might have been run-down before, like the neighboring houses, with chipping concrete walls and old, peeling paint, tired-looking trees, cracked windows, and gravelly, unpaved driveways. But it had been renovated to high standards: double-glazed windows and doors, rich mahogany shutters, a double driveway paved in granite, with a beautiful terra-cotta veranda marking the house’s entrance, surrounded by lush bushes of yellow and red flowers. He felt suddenly like an unwelcome guest, like a thief. He should have turned around and left, but there was something pushing him forward, and so he walked cautiously toward the front door. Music was coming from inside. Something soft and classic. Not quite Sunny Ade and not quite Fela. He stood beside a window now, peering into it at an angle, careful to keep his body hidden behind the concrete portions of the wall. He saw the silhouettes then. A man and a woman, their arms wrapped loosely around each other. They were slow-dancing to the music, swaying gently back and forth. They were laughing and kissing playfully. He recognized her, of course, but what startled him was that he recognized him, too. How could he possibly begin to make sense of the fact that Godwin Onuoha was the man standing in Alare’s home, the man dancing with her, laughing with her, kissing her? He went home. The sun was not yet setting when he started, but it was almost down by the time he arrived. He walked around to the gardens in the back yard, to the wicker chairs, and took a seat. Impossible, he thought. But it was possible. It was not too long ago that he gave Alare the last payment for her husband’s medical bills. And so the question was, where was her husband now? Had he died, after all? And, if so, when? And how could she not have mentioned something as big as her husband’s death? Anyway, he would have caught wind of it in the newspapers or just from random chatter. People around Lagos were always talking about such things: deaths, births, weddings. His legs were stretched out in front of him, his arms folded tightly on his chest. He reasoned some more: At what point had his money stopped going toward Alare’s husband’s medical bills? Had the money ever gone to those bills? He would tell her that he knew, that he had caught her at her own game. Perhaps he would wait until she stopped by again to tell her plainly that he knew the money was not really going for her husband’s checkups. Fixing up their home, buying those fancy cars! And those trips to London and Zurich! Who knew what else? Ha! What a fool he had been! But what was Godwin’s role in all of this? At what point had Alare stolen the groundskeeper? Perhaps right away. Perhaps as swiftly as she had begun stealing his money. What else had she stolen that he had been too blockheaded to see? One question kept returning to him: Just where was her husband now? But, then, did it really matter where he was? It was morning now, and he had spent the night seated on the wicker chair, soaking in the dew. Suddenly, he knew the answer. It settled upon him like condensation. Godwin was her husband. It was, in a sense, a far-fetched explanation, but why not? Why not? They must have been planning it all along, all these years. Some people would do anything in the name of money. No other way to explain it. How long would they have continued the ruse? He rose angrily from the wicker chair. The sun was shining brightly now, that early-morning burst of light. But he felt a darkness all around him—the sun appeared to glow in heavy streaks of black. No need to wait for her to come by before revealing his discovery. He would walk right back to her house—their house—and spew all the blackness on them. He would head over there and announce that he had caught both of them red-handed. He had made it only as far as his gate when the thought occurred to him: Was that what he really wanted? What did he really want? What was at stake for him? What did he stand to lose? He thought of his mother. What had been her greatest hope for him while she was alive? What had she fervently wanted for him? She probably still wanted it for him, even from the grave: a wife. Well, he had not found a wife for himself. But Alare was certainly the next best thing, and so she was at stake for him. She was to him what money was to her. He had pushed open the gate, and was about to step out, but now he turned and pulled it shut. The house girls would be preparing breakfast already, filling the place with the sounds of metal clanging and the scents of buttered toast and fried eggs. He would walk around to the front door. He would take a seat at the mahogany table. The house girls would place his breakfast before him, and he would eat it zestfully, the same way he always ate it, the way he would have eaten it if today were just another ordinary day.

I picked up my father on a sultry morning with heavy, rumbling clouds on the horizon. My mother had thrown him out again, this time for his weight. She’d said that he was insufficiently committed to his weight-loss journey and that if he hit two-fifty she wouldn’t live with him anymore. She seemed to know he’d be heading my way: I had been getting obesity-cure solicitations over the phone, my number doubtless supplied by her. I was tired of explaining to strangers that I wasn’t fat and of being told that a lot of fat people don’t realize how fat they are or wrongly assume that they can do something about it on their own, without paying. By the time my father got to me, he was well over Mom’s limit and he wanted to go somewhere to eat as soon as he got off the plane. He was wearing a suit, rumpled from his travels, but his tie was in place: a protest against the rural surroundings. I took him on a little tour of the town—the rodeo grounds, the soccer field by the river, the old-car museum. He was happiest at the railroad shops, the smell of grease rising from a huge disabled locomotive, mechanics around it like Pygmies around an elephant. “When’s she go back to work?” he asked, his eyes gleaming. The mechanics didn’t look at him; they looked at each other. My father was undismayed: they assumed he was management, he said. At the diner, he asked if the chicken sandwich on the menu was actually made of chicken or was “some conglomerate.” A blank stare from the waitress. He ordered the sandwich. “I’ll just have to find out myself.” He insisted on buying our lunch, but when the cashier counted the change too rapidly for his taste he pushed it all back toward her and said, “Start over.” A man in a suit was an uncommon sight around here and the responses to him indicated bafflement. In the afternoon, I rowed him down the river, still in the suit. He brought along some pie from the restaurant and asked me not to hit it with the oars; he held both hands over the pie as though to protect it. I made dinner at my house, a place he plainly considered a dump. He sat at the card table in a kind of prissy upright way that indicated a fear that the dump was about to rub off on him. “What’s this stuff?” “Tofu.” “Part of the alternate life style?” “No, protein.” I hated to tee him up like this, but he couldn’t go home unless I got some weight off him. Dad owned a booking agency for corporate and private aircraft, and had to act as if he could afford what he booked, but just watching him handle my thrift-shop silverware you could tell that he was and always would be a poor boy. He felt that he had clambered up a few rungs, and his big fear was that I was clambering back down. As a tradesman—I run a construction crew—I had clearly fallen below the social class to which my father thought I should belong. He believed that the fine education he’d paid for should have led me to greater abstraction, but while it’s true that the farther you get from an actual product the better your chances for economic success, I and many of my classmates wanted more physical evidence of our efforts. I had friends who’d trained as historians, literary scholars, and philosophers who were now shoeing horses, wiring houses, and installing toilets. There’d been no suicides so far. My father believed that anything done for pleasure was escapism, except, of course, when it came to seducing his secretaries and most of my mother’s friends. He and my mother had been a glamorous couple early in their marriage; good looks, combined with assertive tastemaking, had put them on top in our shabby little city. Then I came along, and Mother thought I’d hung the moon. In Dad’s view, I put an end to the big romance. When I was a toddler, Dad caught Mom in the arms of our doctor on the screened back porch of the doctor’s fish camp. (Though there must have been some ambivalence about the event, because we continued to accept perch filets from Dr. Hudson’s pond.) A few years later, when the high-school P.E. teacher caught the doctor atop his bride and shot him, Mother cried while Dad tilted his head to the side, elevated his eyebrows, and remarked, “Live by the sword, die by the sword.” As an only child, I was the sole recipient of my parents’ malignant parenting. Their drinking took place entirely in the evening and followed a rigid pattern: with each cocktail they became increasingly thin-skinned, bristling at imaginary slights. When I was young, they occasionally tried to throw me into the middle of their fights (“I don’t believe this! She actually bit me!”), but I developed a suave detachment (“The Band-Aids are in the cupboard behind the towels”). In a real crisis, my mother brought in our neighbor Zoe Constantine for consolation, unaware that Pop had been making the two-backed beast with Zoe since I was in fifth grade—which happened to be the same year that my mother superglued Dad to the toilet seat, so perhaps she had her suspicions. I asked about her now, not without anxiety. “She’s in bed with a bottle and the poems of Edna St. Vincent Millay,” my father said. He was proud of this remark—I’d heard it before. Although my mother read a lot, she was never “in bed with a bottle.” Most likely, she was out playing golf with her friend Bernardine from the typing pool over at Ajax. “Can we talk through a decision that I’ve already made?”Buy the print » My mother comes from a Southern family, though she’s always lived in the North, and she has a tiny private income that has conditioned the dialogue since my childhood. Like a bazillion others of Southern origin, she is a remote beneficiary of some Atlanta pharmacist’s ingenuity, Coca-Cola—not a big remittance, but enough to fuel Dad’s rage against entitlement. That money had much to do with his determination to keep my mother within sight of smokestacks all her life. As did his belief that everything outside the Rust Belt was fake. To him, the American Dream was a three-hundred-and-fifty-pound interior lineman from a bankrupt factory town with five-second forties, a long contract with the Colts, and a bonus for making the Pro Bowl. In the morning, we went out to my job site, and I felt happy at once. Everything there seemed to buoy my spirits: the caked mud on the tires of a carpenter’s truck, the pleasant oily smell of tools, the cool wind coming through the sage on the hill, a screaming Skil saw already at work, the smell of newly cut two-by-fours, a nail gun going off in the basement, three thermoses on an unfinished ledge. The doctor who’d hired me wanted a marshy spot behind the house excavated for a pond, and I had my Nicaraguan, Ángel, out there with a backhoe, trying to find the spring down in the mud so that we could plumb it and spread some bentonite to keep the water from running out. So far, all we’d found was mud and buffalo skulls, which Ángel was piling to one side. I told Dad that this had once been a trap made by Indians, but he wasn’t all that interested. He was drawn to the Nicaraguan, whom he considered someone real on a machine—despite the heavy Central American accent, Dad had found his Rust Belt guy out here among all the phonies in cowboy hats. And Ángel was equally attracted to Dad’s all-purpose warmth. He slid back his ear protectors and settled in for a chat. Evidently, I’d had a flat tire as I pulled up to the site, left front, and it was a motherfucker getting the spare out of a three-quarter-ton Ford, the Ford jacked up on the soft ground, and the whole muddy wheel into the bed to take to town. At the tire shop, Dad looked weird in his slacks and loosened tie, amid all the noise from impact wrenches and the compressors screaming and shutting down, but nobody seemed to notice. He gazed admiringly at the big rough kid in a skullcap running a pry bar around the rim and freeing up the tire. The kid reached inside the tire, tugging and sweating, and presented me with an obsidian arrowhead. I nearly cut myself just taking it from his hand. “Six plies of Jap snow tire and it never broke,” he said. I went up front and paid for the repair. The next day, a cold, rainy day, Dad stayed at my place while I took my crew up to Martinsdale, where we’d hired a crane to drop the bed of an old railroad car onto cribbing to make a bridge over a creek. We’d brought in a stack of treated planks for the deck, and I had a welder on hand to make up the brackets, a painfully shy fellow with a neck tattoo, who still had his New York accent. Five of us stood in the downpour and looked at the creek rushing around our concrete work. The rancher stopped by to tell us that if it washed out he wasn’t paying for anything. When he was gone, Joey, the welder, said, “See what a big hat can do for you?” I’d left Dad at loose ends and I learned later that he’d driven all the way to Helena to see the state capitol and get a lap dance and then slept it off at a Holiday Inn a half mile from Last Chance Gulch. I’ve been told that I come from a dysfunctional family but I have never felt that way. When I was a kid, I viewed my parents as an anthropologist might view them and spent my time as I sometimes spend it now, trying to imagine where on earth they came from. I was conceived soon after Dad got back from Vietnam. I’m not sure he actually wanted to have children, but Mom required prompt nesting when he returned. I guess Dad was pretty wild back then. He’d been in a lot of firefights and loved every one of them, leading his platoon in a daredevil manner. He kept wallet pictures of dead VC draped over the hood of his jeep, like deer-camp photos. His days on leave had been a Saigon fornication blitz, and it fell to Mom to stop that momentum overnight. I was her solution, and from the beginning Dad viewed me skeptically. One night, I crept down the stairs in my Dr. Denton footies to the sound of unusually exuberant and artificial elation and, spying from the door of the kitchen, saw my father on his knees, licking pie filling from one of the beaters of our Sunbeam Mixmaster, tearful and laughing, his long wide tongue lapping at the dripping goo. The extraordinarily stern look on my mother’s face above her starched apron, as he strained upward to the beater, disturbs me to this day. I have a million of these, but disturbance, as I say, is not trauma, and besides I moved away a long time ago. I came to Montana on a hiking trip with my girlfriend after college and never went back. I’ve left here only once, to join a roofing crew in Walnut Creek, California, and came home scared after two months. I saw shit at parties there that it’ll take me years to forget. Everyone from the foreman on down had a crystal habit. I had to pretend I was using just to get the job. Dad returned from Helena and sat in my kitchen with his laptop to catch up on business while I met with Dee and Helen Folsom out on Skunk Creek, leaving the whir of the interstate and veering into real outback within a quarter mile. I was building the Folsoms’ first house, on a piece of ground that Dee’s rancher uncle had given him. Not a nice piece of ground: it’d be a midwinter snow hole and a midsummer rock pile. The Folsoms were old enough to retire, but, as I mentioned, this was their first home. They were poor people. Dee had spent forty years on a fencing crew and constantly massaged his knotty, damaged hands. Helen cooked at the high school, where generations of students had ridiculed her food. I could see that this would be a kind of delayed honeymoon house, and I wanted to get it right. “Do you mean three hundred million dollars on top of what we already have here, or three hundred million dollars including what we already have here?”Buy the print » The house was in frame, and Helen stood in what would be the picture window, enchanted by not much of a view—scrub pine, a shale ledge, the top of a flagless flagpole just below the hill along the road. Her expression would not have been out of place at the Sistine Chapel or on the rim of the Grand Canyon. One hand was plunged into the pocket of her army coat while the other twirled a pair of white plastic reading glasses. Dee just paced in his coveralls, happy and worried, pinching the stub of his cigarette. I had cut this one to the bone—crew salaries and little else. The crew—carpenter, plumber, electrician—sensed the tone of things and worked with timely efficiency. Dee had prepared the site himself with a shovel and a wheelbarrow. We had a summer place for a plastic surgeon under way at Spring Hill, and if I’d looked a little closer I might have seen it bleeding materials that managed to end up at the Folsoms’. While I was at work, Dad was wandering the neighborhood, talking to my neighbors. After a few days, he knew more of them than I did, and I would forever more have to be told what a great guy he was. But by the time I got home he was in his underwear with the portable phone in his lap, nursing a highball and looking disconsolate. “Your mother called me from the club,” he said. “I understand there was some dustup with the manager over the sneeze shield at the salad bar. Mom said she couldn’t see the condiments, and it went from there.” “From there to where?” I inquired peevishly. “Our privileges have been suspended.” “Golf?” “Mm, that, too. Hey, I’ll sort it out.” I nuked a couple of Rock Cornish hens, and we sat down in the living room to play checkers. Halfway through the game, my father went into the guest room and called my mother. This time she told him that she’d bought a car at what she thought was the dealer’s cost. Dad shouted, “Asshole, who got the rebate? I’m asking you, God damn it, who got the rebate?” I heard him raging about the sneeze shield then, and after he quieted down I heard him say plaintively—I think I heard this—that he no longer wished to live. I always looked forward to this particular locution, because it meant that they’d get back together soon. I’m not lacking in affection for my parents, but they are locked into something that is so exclusive as to be hermetically sealed to everyone else, including me. Nevertheless, I’d had a bellyful by then. So when my father came back to finish the checkers game, I asked him if he’d enjoyed the lap dance. “ ‘Enjoy’ isn’t quite the word. I’m aware that the world has changed in my lifetime and I’m interested in those changes. I went to this occasion as . . . as . . . almost as an investigator.” “You might want to withhold the results of your research from Mom.” “How dare you raise your voice to me!” “Jump you and jump you again. Checkers isn’t fun if you don’t pay attention.” “I was distracted by the club thing. I’m red, right?” At some point, I knew he would confide that he and my mother were considering a divorce. They’ve been claiming to be contemplating divorce for half of my lifetime, and I have found myself stuck in the odd trope of opposing the idea just to please them. I don’t know why they toss me into this or if only children always have this kind of veto power. I do care about them, but what they don’t know, and I would never have the heart to tell them, is that the idea of their no longer being a married couple bothers me not at all. My only fear is that, separate, no one else would have them, that I’d get stuck with them one at a time or have to watch them wither away in solitude. These scenarios give me the fantods. Am I selfish? Yes and no. I’m a bachelor and hope someday to be an old bachelor. My father picked at a bit of imaginary dust on his left shirt cuff, and I suspected that this was the opener to the divorce gambit. Cruelly, I got up and left the game half finished. “Can you pardon me? I was slammed from daylight on. I’m all in.” “Well, sure, O.K., good night. I love you, son.” “Love you, too, Dad.” And I did. When my father came home from the war, he was jubilant about all the violence he’d seen. Happy to have survived, I suppose. Or perhaps he saw it as a game, a contest in which his platoon had triumphed. He worked furiously to build a business, but there was something peculiar about his hard work. He seemed to have no specific goal. When I was fourteen, my mother said, “Do you know why your father works so hard?” I thought I was about to get a virtue speech. I said, “No.” She said, “He works so hard because he’s crazy.” She never elaborated on this, but left it in play, and it has remained with me for more than a quarter of a century. The only time my father ever hit me was when I was fifteen and he asked if I was aware of all the things he and my mother had done for me. I said, “Do you have a chart I could point to?” and he popped me square on the nose, which bled copiously while he ran for a box of Kleenex. His worst condemnation of me was when he’d mutter, “If you’d been in my platoon . . .”—a sentence he always left unfinished. My mother was a scientist; she worked in an infectious-disease lab until my father’s financial success made her income unnecessary. Even then, she went on buying things on time, making down payments, anxiety from their poorer days leading her to believe that she wouldn’t live long enough to pay off her debts, even with her Coca-Cola money. Once they were comfortable with affluence, they became party people, went to the tropics, brought back mounted fish, and listened to Spanish tapes in the car. But they were never truly comfortable away from the smoke and rust of their home town. “Oh, yeah, I took your special chair to ‘Antiques Roadshow.’ ”Buy the print » The last year I lived with them, my father came to the bizarre conclusion that he lacked self-esteem and he bought a self-help program that he was meant to listen to through headphones as he slept. From my bedroom, I could hear odd murmurings from these devices attached to his sleeping head: “You are the greatest, you are the greatest. Look around you—it’s a beautiful day.” You can’t make this shit up. We were nearly done with the plastic surgeon’s vacation home. I had a big crew there, and everyone was nervous about whether we’d have someplace to go next. We had remodels coming up, and a good shot at condominiumizing the old Fairweather Hotel in town, but nothing for sure. I met with Dr. Hadley to lay out the basement media room. He was a small man in a blazer and bow tie, bald on top but with long hair to his collar. I asked him, “Are you sure you want this? You have beautiful views.” Indeed, he had a whole cordillera stretched across his living-room window. He was gazing around the space we were inspecting, at the bottom of some temporary wooden stairs. Push brooms stood in a pile of drywall scraps in the corner. There was a smell of plaster. He lifted his eyes to engage mine, and said, “Sometimes it rains.” One of the carpenters, a skinny cowboy type with a perpetual cigarette at the center of his mouth, overheard this and crinkled his forehead. No checkers tonight. Dad was laying out his platoon diagram, a kind of spreadsheet, with all his guys, as he called them, listed. “When I can’t fill this out, I’ll know I have dementia,” he said. It was remarkable, a big thing on butcher paper, maybe twenty-five names, with their specialties and rankings designated—riflemen, machine gunners, radiomen, grenadiers, fire-team leaders, and so on. There was, characteristically, a star beside my father’s name, the C.O. Some names were crossed out with Vietnam dates; some were annotated as natural-cause eliminations. It was all so orderly—even the deaths seemed orderly, once you saw them on this spreadsheet. I think this was how Dad dealt with mortality: when a former sergeant died of cirrhosis in his sixties, Dad crossed out his square on the spreadsheet with the same grim aplomb he’d used for the twenty-somethings in firefights; it was all war to him, from, as he said, “the erection to the Resurrection.” Although he complained all the time, Dad lost weight on my regimen. When he got below the magic number, Mom didn’t believe my scale or my word, and we had to have him weighed at the fire station, with a fireman reading the number to her over the phone, while Dad rounded up a couple of guys to show him the hook-and-ladder. He’d made it by a little over a pound. When I came home from the plastic surgeon’s house that night, Dad was packing up. He had a glass of whiskey on the nightstand, and his little tape player was belting out a nostalgic playlist: Mott the Hoople, Dusty Springfield, Captain Beefheart, Quicksilver Messenger Service—his courting songs. My God, he was heading home to Mom again! “Got it worked out?” I said, flipping through one of the girlie magazines he’d picked up in Helena, a special on “barely legals.” “We’ll see.” “Anything new?” “Not at all. She’s the only one who understands me.” “No one understands you.” “Really? I think it’s you that nobody understands. Anyway, there are some preliminaries in this case that I can live with.” “Like what?” “I can’t go to the house. I have to stay at a hotel.” “And you’re O.K. with that?” “Why wouldn’t I be? A lot of surprising stuff happens at a hotel. For all intents and purposes, I’ll be home.” And now I have to figure out how to work around Dee and Helen Folsom, who are on the job site continuously and kind of in the way. One night, they camped out on the subflooring of what will be their bedroom, when we barely had the sheathing on the roof. The crew had to shoo them away in the morning. I think the Folsoms were embarrassed, dragging the blow-up mattress out to their old sedan. I have no real complaints about my upbringing. My parents were self-absorbed and never knew where I was, which meant that I was free, and I made good use of that freedom. I’ve been asked if I was damaged by my family life, and the answer is a qualified no; I know I’ll never marry, and, halfway through my life, I’m unable to imagine letting anyone new stay in my house for more than a night—and preferably not a whole night. Rolling over in the morning and finding . . . let’s not go there. I build houses for other people, and it works for me. I like to be tired. In some ways, that’s the point of what I do. I don’t want to be thinking when I go to bed, or, if there is some residue from the day, I want it to drain out and precipitate me into nothingness. I’ve always enjoyed the idea of nonexistence. I view pets with extraordinary suspicion: we need to stay out of their lives. I saw a woman fish a little dog out of her purse once, and it bothered me for a year. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with my ability to communicate: I have a cell phone, but I only use it to call out.